RIP Deep Throat

Hank Stuever: Deep Throat's death comes as no shock to the nursing-home atmosphere that sometimes looms over American newspapering these days, where we tend to log on each morning and ask, while chewing soft food, who's dead now? (Or, who's been laid off? Who's stopped subscribing? Who's stopped delivering? Who's decided to close their Washington bureau?)

Follow the money?

What's money?

He'd been identified three years before, anyway, ending this town's best parlor game. W. Mark Felt Sr. was the secret source who played an important and clandestine role in The Washington Post's investigation into the Watergate break-in and ensuing, primordial White House imbroglio of the 1970s. But he was more than that, to a certain skeptical spectrum of Americans. He was Deep Throat, ya know? Without a single byline he inspired thousands and thousands of campus misfits to get journalism degrees, each one of them in pursuit of bad haircuts, smoking habits and the next Deep Throat, the next huge story. Any "-gate" that followed or may yet follow feels incomplete without its own Deep Throat.