A few weeks ago I watched "All The President's Men" for the first time in more than 20 years. Set in the early 1970s, it was a potent blast from the past, but what struck me wasn't the relative youth of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman or the pre-Internet drudge work that their real-life characters, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, carried out while investigating the Watergate break-in. What struck me was their professional attitude.
The movie's drama springs from the relentless search for at least one source who will allow his name to be printed. The most memorable line in the movie is Post editor Ben Bradlee's frustrated cry, "When will somebody go on the goddamn record?"
How times have changed. Unnamed sources and off-the-record comments have become the rule, not the exception. The Bush administration essentially sold the Iraq War by leaking information about Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction to a gullible media, including the Post and The New York Times. This information always came from anonymous officials and experts.