by Nora Ephron
Well, excuse me but my feelings were a little hurt. I like Daily Kos, even though he is under a major delusion about the political future of Mark Warner. And I thought the whole point of the blogosphere was that it was a big wide-open place like the world itself where everyone was welcome. Only a few days ago, someone in the Internet world told me there were 62,000 new blogs a day. Isn’t that amazing? (I’m pretty sure that’s what he said. I wrote the number down on a piece of paper and promptly lost it.) It’s clear that at this rate, everyone in the world will have a blog. It’s what we’ll give babies when they’re born, instead of rattles.
It has not been a good week for bloggers, so I don’t want to make it seem as if it was any worse for me just because I was attacked by a blogger. Judy Miller was back in an article in Vanity Fair, blaming the bloggers, and Donald Rumsfeld was on CBS, blaming the bloggers, and Joe Lieberman is quoted (in Daily Kos, by Kos himself) blaming the bloggers. And of course, there was what is now called Clooneygate, about which may I say if there was ever a celebrity who didn’t need a platform to be heard it’s George Clooney, and I was still happy to see him blogging, and sad to discover that he didn’t actually mean to be doing it.
Bloggers—aka the pajama people—are now the class everyone loves to beat up on, the bottom of the barrel, the writers even journalists can look down on, and now bloggers are even bashing other bloggers just for blogging.
But it seems to me that Kos is missing the point of blogs. Not that there’s only one point about blogs, there are thousands. But there are two I’d like to make. One is that, yes, it’s true that some people who blog can probably get their blogs printed elsewhere. But where? First you have to send the blog elsewhere. Then you have to get someone elsewhere to read it. That person is what’s known as an editor, who might or might not like what you have sent in. If he likes it, he probably has to show it to another person. Then they have to get back to you. (They might even have “suggestions” or “changes,” God forbid.) Days and weeks can pass in this manner. If you have sent your writing to a place that publishes only occasionally, weeks or months might pass before your words are printed anywhere, by which time you stand a good chance of being even less relevant and truthful than you were in the first place. I mean, time is of the essence, and not just when it comes to things of this sort.
But the other point I want to make is that getting heard outside the world of blogs occasionally requires that you have something to say. And one of the most delicious things about the profoundly parasitical world of blogs is that you don’t have to have anything much to say. Or you just have to have a little tiny thing to say. You just might want to say hello. I’m here. And by the way. On the other hand. Nevertheless. Did you see this? Whatever. A blog is sort of like an exhale. What you hope is that whatever you’re saying is true for about as long as you’re saying it. Even if it’s not much.
—March 23, 2006
Deep Throat and Me: Now It Can Be Told, and Not for the First Time Either
FOR MANY YEARS, I have lived with the secret of Deep Throat’s identity. It has been hell, and I have dealt with the situation by telling pretty much anyone who asked me, including total strangers, who Deep Throat was. Not for nothing is indiscretion my middle name.
I knew that Deep Throat was Mark Felt because I figured it out. Carl Bernstein, to whom I was married for a brief time, certainly would never have told me; he was far too intelligent to tell me a secret like that. He refused to tell his children, too, who are also my children, so I told them, and they told others, and even so, years passed and no one really listened to any of us. Years passed while unbelievably idiotic ideas of who Deep Throat was were floated by otherwise intelligent people. There were theories about John Dean, and David Gergen, and Alexander Haig, and L. Patrick Gray and Diane Sawyer and Ron Ziegler (Ron Ziegler!), and I’m pretty sure even Henry Kissinger’s name came up. I mean, really. Why these people with these ludicrous theories didn’t call me I cannot imagine. I am listed.
Only the other day, a well-known and credible journalist who shall be nameless suggested to me that Deep Throat did not exist, that he was a composite character invented by Bob Woodward. I tried to explain to him that Bob Woodward would never have invented anything, much less a composite character, but as I say, no one listened.
The clues to Deep Throat’s identity were clear:
Bob and Carl wrote in All the President’s Men that Woodward’s code name for their source—before he was christened Deep Throat by Washington Post managing editor Howard Simons—was My Friend. Hello.
Long before Bob and Carl had become Woodward and Bernstein, they told writer Timothy Crouse that their anonymous source for their early stories worked in the Justice Department, and Crouse printed it in The Boys on the Bus, his book about the press and the 1972 presidential campaign.
If you read All the President’s Men carefully, you can see that whoever Deep Throat was had access to FBI files within days of the Watergate break-in, and that the most obvious suspect was probably a high-level official at the FBI.
Mark Felt was a navy veteran, and so was Woodward.
I can see just from reading the early coverage about Mark Felt’s revelation that he has had a hard time living with this secret, too. For years, he has had to hear the constant refrain from Woodward that Deep Throat’s identity would not be revealed until Deep Throat died; I don’t know about you, but if I were Deep Throat, that would start to get on my nerves. So Felt began to tell the people in his family the truth. “I’m the guy they used to call Deep Throat,” he allegedly said to them. My guess is that they reacted with incredulity; after all, that’s how people have reacted to me over the years. And then, inevitably, they probably began to wonder about who was going to own the rights to the television movie.
So Mark Felt and his family let Vanity Fair have the story, and now everyone has admitted it’s true, and all I can say is that this is a huge load off my mind. Mark Felt is Deep Throat. Don’t say I didn’t try to tell you.
—May 31, 2005
The Curious Incident of the Veep in the Summertime
FOR SOME TIME I’ve been wondering whether anyone is going to explain the true mystery of what happened after Hurricane Katrina struck. I read thousands of words on the subject in this morning’s New York Times, and I still don’t get it. Where was the president? And more to the point, where was the vice president? And don’t tell me Crawford, Texas, and on a ranch in Wyoming. For days there was an absolute vacuum at the top. Why? What was going on?
You’ll be happy to hear that I have a theory. Is it possible that the president and the vice president have fallen out? I mean, I’m just asking. But if you remember September 11, 2001—and I’m sure you do—the president had no idea what to do, but the vice president did. The vice president took over. He didn’t even consult with the president. He put the president on Air Force One and the president spent the day flying from one airport to another, which was something that even the president eventually understood made him look as if he wasn’t in charge.
The relationship between Cheney and Bush has always reminded me of a moment I witnessed in the movie business many years ago. I had written a script for an actress, and she had decided she wanted to direct it. This was a terrible idea, because she was famous for dithering, but there was no question that the studio would make the movie if she directed it. “Don’t worry about it,” the producer of the movie said to me when I asked if she was remotely capable of directing a movie. “We can walk her through it.”
It’s always been clear to me that five years ago, when all those Republican guys got together and realized that George Bush could be elected president—and that he wasn’t remotely capable—they came to an understanding: they would walk him through it. I’m sure it seemed like a swell idea, especially because it meant that they’d be in a perfect position to convince him to do all sorts of exciting things they had always wanted to do.
Cheney was the point man. Cheney was the g
uy they put on Meet the Press. Cheney was the person who seemed always to be the first responder. Cheney was the official they put into the bunker last May when a plane flew too close to the White House; Bush, who was bicycling in Maryland, wasn’t even told about the episode until forty minutes after it was over. Even Laura Bush, who was in the bunker with Cheney, publicly questioned the decision to keep the president in the dark.
But if you look at the chart in Sunday’s New York Times, which tells you who was where when Katrina struck, Cheney doesn’t even get a listing. It’s Bush, Chertoff, Brown. Bush I and Bill Clinton were summoned to help. But Cheney didn’t even turn up back in Washington until last week, when he was sent off for a day of spouting platitudes while touring the flood zone.
Like the curious incident of the dog that didn’t bark in the famous Sherlock Holmes story, Cheney’s the missing person in this event, and one has to wonder why. If he were a woman, I would guess he’d been busy recovering from a face-lift, but he’s not. So I can only suppose that something has gone wrong. Could the president be irritated that Cheney helped con him into Iraq? Oh, all right, probably not. Could Cheney—and not just his aides—possibly be involved in the Valerie Plame episode? Is Cheney not speaking to Karl Rove? Does the airplane/bicycle incident figure into this in any way? And how is it possible that the president is off on vacation and the vice president is, too? Not that it matters that much if the president is on vacation; on some level, the president is always on vacation. But where was Cheney?
Just asking.
—September 11, 2005
Hooked on Anonymity
“The frustration throughout the week was getting good, reliable information,” said the aide, who demanded anonymity so as not to be identified in disclosing inner workings of the White House. “Getting truth on the ground in New Orleans was very difficult.”
From a New York Times piece September 10, 2005, by Elisabeth Bumiller, on the White House decision to remove Michael Brown of FEMA from ongoing supervision of hurricane relief.
I’VE BECOME HOOKED on the excuses the New York Times is providing for using anonymous sources. Of course, the Times doesn’t think of them as excuses—they think of them as motivations. “Whenever anonymity is granted, it should be the subject of energetic negotiation to arrive at phrasing that will tell the reader as much as possible about the placement and motivation of the source”—this is from the new set of Times standards instituted after the Jayson Blair fiasco two years ago.
Allan M. Siegal, the standards editor at the Times, whose position was created After Blair, gave an interview a couple of weeks ago to the public editor at the Times. In it, Siegal elaborated further on the question of anonymity, and said that he spends part of each day randomly vetting the next day’s stories for anonymous sources and occasionally calling editors to ask about them. Last Saturday, when a motive for anonymity failed to appear in Elisabeth Bumiller’s story about the White House decision to remove Michael Brown—and then turned up inserted in the article in subsequent editions (as quoted above)—I amused myself imagining the last-minute phone call and “energetic negotiation” that were probably involved. It reminded me of my days as a reporter writing profiles at the New York Post. The then-owner of the Post, Dorothy Schiff, was obsessed with mixed marriages, and every time a profile of a Jewish man who’d married a gentile woman was about to appear, she would phone the editor and demand we call the interview subject to find out what religion his children were being raised as, and whether actual bar mitzvahs were going to be involved. We were constantly having to scramble at the last minute to reach the person we were profiling, and to explain—mortified—why we were calling.
My own feeling about the Times’s policy is that it’s misguided and naive and will someday make a fine chapter in a book about this era of transparency we’re currently enduring. Where the notion of transparency originated is a mystery to me, but I first recall seeing the word in a mea culpa the Times issued at the time of the Blair episode. I was puzzled that anyone could possibly believe that a corporation, much less a newspaper, could possibly benefit in any way from making its process visible. My own experience at newspapers—and I will grant that the New York Post in the 1960s was a peculiar place—was that much of what the editors did consisted of sending reporters to journalistic Siberia, which at the Post involved writing about dead people or the Board of Education.
Enough nostalgia. Here’s the point: anonymous sources are never going to admit the truth about why they prefer to be anonymous. They are never going to say, the reason I’m willing to be your anonymous source is that I’m in a power struggle with the person I’m giving you information about. They are never going to say, I’m willing to talk to you about Fred (but don’t use my name) because he slept with my ex-wife. They’re never going to say, the reason I’m talking to you off the record is that I’m a malicious gossip and have nothing better to do. They’re never going to say, I’m talking to you on background in the hopes of convincing you that my version of events is true, although it probably isn’t. Or, I’m talking to you on background because I’m essentially shilling for the president, but if I make the quote anonymous it will sound as if I’ve told you something top secret. They’re certainly never going to say (as Ahmed Chalabi ought to have when he spent so many years being the most effective anonymous source since Deep Throat), I’m talking to you on condition of anonymity because I hope to plant false information about weapons of mass destruction in your very powerful newspaper in order to con the United States government into going to war against Saddam Hussein so I can return to Iraq and become part of the new government and steal a whole bunch more money than I already have.
And by the way, sources aren’t the only people who opt for anonymity. Reporters, especially beat reporters, often have only a few reliable sources, whom they use day after day. One traditional way of cultivating them is to keep their names out of the newspapers. No one with a job likes to be known as a reliable source. And no reporter likes it known that he has only a few sources. What’s more, anonymity protects the reporter from losing his reliable source to other bird-dogging reporters.
Of course, it’s possible that the pendulum will swing back, and the Times—and some of the other national publications that have followed suit—will give all this up and go back to being the delightfully opaque places they used to be. But in the meantime, the odd thing about this policy is that it almost seems to have the opposite effect of what’s intended. Since sources are never really going to admit their true motives for wanting to remain anonymous, they will lie. They will lie because the New York Times is going to persuade them to lie, urge them to lie, enable them to lie, demand they lie, and furthermore even negotiate the lie. And then the New York Times is going to print the lie and call it a motivation. But it’s not a motivation. At best, it’s an excuse—a bland, misleading excuse. But it’s nowhere near the whole truth.
—September 14, 2005
One Small Blog
THE WORLD IS One Big Blog, that’s what the panel was called that I went to today. Here was the idea of the panel, articulated by moderator Ken Auletta: “Some say blogs are a way to democratize the media…. Others say they may rob democracy of a common sense of … ” something or other. I don’t know what that something or other was, because I can’t read my notes and all I can hear on my tape recorder are some indistinct voices and the sound of someone coughing. Actually, it’s me coughing. I could call Ken Auletta and ask him what it was he said exactly, but that would involve reporting, and I learned this morning at the panel on blogs that when you are a blogger, you are so busy blogging that you don’t have time to report.
Anyway, you get the idea of the panel, and as with all panels the moderator framed the question beautifully, and then the panel went on to other things. We never really did find out about the effect of blogs on democracy. (I don’t think we did, anyway.)
On the panel were Ana Marie Cox, Wonkette herself, and Jason Calacanis, cof
ounder of Weblogs, dressed perfectly in a pair of ripped jeans (I am not one of you) and a blazer (on the other hand, I am one of you). Arianna Huffington was supposed to be on the panel, too, but had to cancel and was replaced by her Huffington Post business partner Ken Lerer. They spoke at Condé Nast to a room full of (mostly) men, (mostly) in blazers, all this sponsored by The New Yorker magazine and the Newhouse School.
We establish from the beginning that the best thing about being a blogger, besides not having to do reporting, is that you never actually have to get dressed—you can work in your pajamas (Wonkette) or your bathrobe (Calacanis). “Blogging is ridiculously easy to do,” Wonkette says. “My cat could do it.” We also learn almost immediately that Calacanis is flirting with a number of companies that apparently are going to buy him out for (I guess) millions of dollars. He gives us a list of the companies that are in the bidding for Weblogs, this, too, lost in the ether of my tape recorder; my memory is that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is at the top of the list.
Calacanis is very impressive and confident, reeling off endless thrilling acronyms and technical terms that are Greek to me. He says that what blogs are really good at is getting to the truth. He says that if Jayson Blair’s fraudulent articles had appeared on the Internet instead of in the New York Times, he would have been nailed immediately. I guess this is the case, although I can’t help but think Calacanis is missing the delicious point about truth and blogs. It’s not that the blogosphere doesn’t care about the truth, but that truth is a very limited, overrated concept, and nowhere is this more clear than on the Internet. It’s true, for example, that there was a panel discussion about blogs this morning at Condé Nast moderated by Ken Auletta, and it’s also true that certain things were said at it, many of them not picked up by my tape recorder. But what actually happened this morning? Nothing? Anything? Something? Everything? That depends on how you look at it. Which, by the way, is, to me, the point of blogs, and it’s what makes their relationship to the truth so interesting.
