Deep Throat Made Newspapers 'Cool'

Mark Felt's life inspires an appreciation of a heroic man, but also of the romance and significance of journalism, Hank Stuever writes in the Washington Post. In fact, you could say “that the idea of him had died already, a few years ago, when he allowed the world to know who he was,” Stuever writes. But Deep Throat lives on in the dreams of every young journalist, in “the swagger of it all.”

Mark Felt was part of what made journalism “cool,” Stuever writes, “a small but crucial part of a story that changes the world. Cool is the idea that there are parking garages in the afterlife of Mark Felt and in the next life of journalism.” As anyone who waited in line for a paper on November 5 knows, the allure of print is alive and well. “May this also be an appreciation of the newspaper itself, as a tactile and intellectual thing, still alive?” (More Mark Felt stories.)