Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
My older son used to be a journalist. He had high standards and made sure. But "always" is a pretty high standard -- actually, impossible. Everyone makes mistakes. The better the newspaper, the more corrections it publishes.
Having finished Fear, I'm now most of the way through All the President's Men. The latter convinces me that the earlier Woodward/Bernstein team always made sure. Now, once in a great while, they made a mistake. The mistake they write about the most (at least in the first 60 percent of the book) was one where they had four sources.
...
|
As I mentioned earlier, once the identity of the leaker, Mark Felt, was made public in 2005, people started calling into question the accuracy of All The King's Men. Many said that Deep Throat in the book was actually a combination of informants, merged together for dramatic effect. It's not unexpected that Bob Woodward would be the hero in his own story, but sometimes artistic license wins out over accuracy.
[just as a note, Felt, the Associate Director of the FBI during that time period, turned informant because he was upset that he was bypassed for the Director's job in favor of L Patrick Gray and wanted to get back at Nixon and Gray.]