someone has probably asked this already (watergate)

Factual Questions
1

Hi. While I’m a newbie to this board, I’m not a newbie to MBs. And even then, I haven’t posted 50 million posts. :wink:

I just ran across this website while trying to understand the movie “All the President’s Men” better. (I’m reviewing it for school)

It’s called:

http://www.edwardjayepstein.com

Under fictoid #5 is the assertion that deep throat didn’t exist at all. I especially have a problem with this paragraph:
It is not even clear how he can claim directly to quote Deep Throat — earlier in the book (p.71), Woodward says that he solemnly agreed “never to quote the man even as an anonymous source.” Even if Woodward was not concerned with such a demonstrable breach of his agreement, the book’s publisher, Simon &Schuster, and movie producer, Warner Bros. might have been concerned with the potential breach of contract exposure. however, that to sue, Deep Throat would have had to come forward and prove his identity, which an invented character is not in a position to do.
Now that argument could also work the other way. Suppose Deep Throat really existed, and just kept his mouth shut to avoid further exposure? If you don’t want to be publicly known, you’re not going to draw more attention to yourself.

I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts about this, or comments about the website itself.
“Forget the myths the media has created about the white house. Truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”-deep throat

2

It looks to me like Jay’s website is a collection of “fictional things” (hence the coined word “fictoid” instead of “factoid”, I suppose), like the Orson Welles War of the Worlds thing, and somebody’s fictional idea of what Bin Laden’s “lair” would look like.

In other words, he is not an authoritative source on what went down during Watergate. He’s just retailing some amusing ideas, is all.

The idea that there never was a “Deep Throat” is certainly not his own–people have been saying that for the last 25 years.

Most people agree that yes, there probably was a real person who gave Woodward and Bernstein inside information. They couldn’t have just made stuff up.

But there are all kinds of theories as to who it was. This journalism class has been working on it for years. Good stuff here.
http://www.comm.uiuc.edu/spike/deepthroat/

These are their seven finalists.
http://www.comm.uiuc.edu/spike/deepthroat/11.html
Also, try a Google search for “who was deep throat” and “identity deep throat”.

www.google.com