E-Mail This Article to a Friend Deep Throat between hard covers How today's media screw with Watergate history BY MARK JURKOWITZ

Just as Bob Woodward’s new book detailing his relationship with "Deep Throat" hits the stores today, a new Gallup poll suggests just how much the legacy of America’s most famous leaker has been distorted -- with a major assist from a modern media culture that turns every story into a right vs. left, good vs. evil battle.

Having been scooped on the identity of his own source -- former top FBI official W. Mark Felt -- by Vanity Fair magazine, Woodward has quickly gotten back into the game with The Secret Man, which has thus far garnered appreciative nods, but mixed reviews. But now that journalism’s three-decade guessing game is over, the "Deep Throat" gravy train is starting to chug down the tracks. Another book and a movie are reportedly in the works. And according to a Washington Post story, Tom Hanks may be in line to play the world’s most famous anonymous source.

Well, maybe the likeable Hanks will be able to salvage Felt’s reputation. Because according to the Gallup survey of 1,009 adults released today, 51% of the respondents said that based on what they have "heard or read," they do not consider "Deep Throat" to be a hero, while only 39% lauded his role in uncovering Nixonian misdeeds as heroic. And 47 % of those polled supported the dubious propositions that Felt didn’t change the course of history or even changed it for the worse.

This current negativity and ambiguity surrounding "Deep Throat’s" role doesn’t seem to reflect the reality of 31 years ago when the Watergate scandal doomed Nixon’s presidency. According to Gallup polls taken then, Nixon’s job approval ratings in the summer of 1974 cratered at about 24% while about two-thirds of the country said the president’s wrongdoing merited a trial by the Senate and almost 60% said the president should face possible criminal charges.

In his review of The Secret Man in today’s Boston Globe, former Nixon advisor David Gergen accurately noted that the relationship between Woodward and Felt "played a pivotal role in bringing the country back from the edge of chaos." And in the 1976 film, All the President’s Men, "Deep Throat" was played with cloak-and-dagger, save-the-republic dash by Hal Holbrook. (Woodward himself was flatteringly portrayed by the industry’s top leading man at the time, Robert Redford) According to the Internet Movie Data Base, the film, which cost an estimated $8.5 million to make, grossed more than $100 million at the box office and in rentals, numbers that would make most Hollywood executives salivate. Clearly, America saw the Post reporters and their secret source as the good guys in a riveting national drama.

So how, in 2005, did "Deep Throat" become a non-heroic, perhaps even traitorous figure? Blame it on today’s poisonous Crossfire culture -- driven by talk radio and the non-stop cable news talkers -- which mandates that every subject, every revelation be debated and rehashed along partisan lines.

Once Felt’s identity was revealed on May 31, the frenzy began. Online polls asked surfers to vote "Is Mark Felt a Hero or Villain?" Stories with headlines like "Informer: Hero or Villain" ran in newspapers across the country. Former Nixon scoundrels like G. Gordon Liddy and Chuck Colson -- men who did time for Watergate-related activities -- had the brass to grab microphones and denounce Felt as ethically challenged.

In a piece of elegant understatement, former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, during an online chat, said: "I am really baffled by Colson and Gordon Liddy lecturing the world about public morality."

Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog group, has documented how conservative commentators and pundits such as Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh opened a fresh line of attack against Felt, asserting that the FBI whistleblower’s role in Nixon’s resignation helped cause the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, leaving residents of Southeast Asia vulnerable to vicious totalitarian regimes.

Paul Waldman, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, says that "historical revisionism" about the Nixon administration as well as an argumentative, polarizing media culture have combined to retroactively turn "Deep Throat’s" laudable deeds into -- for want of a better term -- a debatable subject.

Aside from today’s Gallup poll, the most sobering reminder that the revisionists have succeeded was a Baltimore Sun story revealing that when a local high school class decided to devote a class to "Deep Throat," a majority of the students said Felt behaved unethically. One teenager even ventured that the "public should only know so much."

Maybe Woodward’s quickie book on Felt can help restore his good name and remind us of what life was like in the waning days of Watergate when the republic seemed gravely threatened. But for now, a media industry intent on imposing its relentless "he said, she said" paradigm on events that occurred more than 30 years ago, seems to have turned reality on its head.