If you’re the sort of media junkie we are, you’re probably checking in with Jim Romenesko’s column more often than you’d like to admit. Which means you’ve likely seen the Baltimore Sun story on how, as Romenesko put it, “Most in high school honors class say Deep Throat was wrong.” Of the twelve juniors in Melinda Kenny’s philosophy class, only three “came out strongly in defense of W. Mark Felt’s decision to guide reporter Bob Woodward” from behind the scenes, while the majority said his actions were unethical.
As we’ve said before, we have our own issues with Felt and his apparently tangled motivations. And we’re aware of recent studies that indicate that the kids of America aren’t sure the First Amendment was such a great idea in the first place. But when we read some of the quotes in the Sun piece, well, we wanted to pack up our stuff and head to the comfort room. (I mean, we expect this kind of trash from Peggy Noonan — who wrote that Mark Felt was responsible for genocide — but the children? An entire generation of little Peggy Noonans, about to be slungshot into adulthood? The horror, the horror.)
Consider the comment of 16-year-old YinYin Yu, who, as the Sun put it, “said Felt did not need to inform the public about Nixon’s behavior because all politicians act unethically.”
“They don’t have ethics. They have politics,” said Yu. “No one acts ethically all the time, and in politics it’s more effective to act unethically than ethically.”
“Effective” should be the yardstick, apparently, not “ethical” — a rather distressing philosophy, particularly coming from a teenager.
Another student said the appropriate action for Felt was “to go to his superiors,” which would have been, well, a really bad idea in this case. (As an acerbic Ben Bradlee dryly observed to the Los Angeles Times yesterday, “Where would Felt have gone? He saw something wrong in the government, and what should he have done? He couldn’t really go to his superior, who was L. Patrick Gray, who was busy throwing documents into the Potomac River from the bridge. He couldn’t go to the attorney general [John Mitchell] who was on his way to jail himself.” And he certainly couldn’t have gone to Oval Office gatekeepers H.R. Haldemann and John Ehrlichman, who, like Mitchell, eventually ended up serving time for their role in covering President Nixon’s tracks.)
Sixteen-year-old Charles Kozak took another tack. He said “if it was truly to benefit society, [Felt] wouldn’t have kept his name secret.” If Kosak elaborated — that is, explained how there might be a logical disconnect between being anonymous and doing something socially beneficial — it didn’t make the piece. We sure as hell can’t figure out what he’s talking about.
On the plus side, the news isn’t all bad. We were particularly taken with seventeen-year-old Evan Fuller, who said, responding to a classmate who suggested the scandal weakened the U.S.’s position in the Cold War, “Before you can be concerned about protecting America as a superpower, you need to be concerned about protecting America as a democracy.”
Too bad Evan doesn’t have a larger stage. After all, he could certainly teach Peggy a thing or two.
–Brian Montopoli
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.