Media masturbation and Deep Throat

Oh, joy. The elite media, notably the The Washington Post the others trying to garner some reflected glory, are in full self-congratulatory mood over an event that happened more than 30 years ago.

The revelation of Mark Felt, former No. 2 man at the FBI, as the infamous Deep Throat of Watergate fame, have brought the elite media out in full force and in full self-important face. After the disgraces based on "unnamed sources" in the past year(CBS and Newsweek, most notably), the elite media are now in full-court-press mode to try to convince an increasingly disinterested public that it used to be relevant and should still be considered so.

"No, really, it's true. Ask anyone. We really were important. See, we helped bring down a president. If that doesn't make us important, I don't what could. Now, you'll go back to respecting and fearing us AND LIKE IT!"

As to Felt, I am not going to accept the media's hype and whitewash that he was truly a selfless man who's only interest was rooting out malfeasance in high office. He clearly had an axe to grind, he having been passed over for the directorship when Hoover died in 1972. And, not to put too fine a point on it, he did exactly what other people went to jail for, namely leaking confidential FBI information to the media. Why is he honored and others went to jail?

Also, John Dean doesn't think Felt was the only Deep Throat because some of the information The WaPo got from DT was info that Felt, as a bureaucrat out in an agency, wouldn't have had access to. No access to the White House, no access to the presidential re-election campaign. But anyway . . . .

If there's anything more stomach-turning than all of the media navel-gazing when they do something wrong is all of the media's self-congratulatory huzzahs when they actually do something significant.