Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Watergate Anonymous Source "Deep Throat" Comes Forward: 06/01/05
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june05/deepthroat_6-01.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What was the Watergate scandal?

2. Have you heard of Woodward and Bernstein? Who where they?

3. What are anonymous sources and what are their roles in journalism?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. Who is Mark Felt?

Mark Felt, a 91-year-old retiree, was the number two at the FBI when men paid for by President Nixon's reelection committee broke into the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. He gave secret information to reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that encouraged them to follow the trail from a seemingly insignificant burglary to a cover-up organized by the Nixon administration.

2. What role did the Washington Post play in the downfall of President Richard Nixon?

The Post's articles eventually led Congress to investigate the White House and proceed with hearings that would have led to impeachment.

3. What was the Watergate scandal?

The Watergate scandal began with a simple burglary on June 17, 1972. Five men were arrested in the act of breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington's Watergate hotel and office building.

A few days later the burglars were connected to E. Howard Hunt, a former White House aide, and to G. Gordon Liddy, a lawyer for the Committee for the Reelection of President Nixon.

Despite the ties to his campaign, the president repeatedly denied any involvement in the affair.

That November President Nixon won reelection to the White House by a landslide, but the story of Watergate would not go away. Throughout the summer of 1973, Congress held dramatic televised hearings that slowly drew out the truth.

4. What laws did President Nixon and his associated break?

Through the hearings and stories that appeared in the Washington Post and other newspapers, it became increasingly clear that President Nixon and his aides had broken one law after another to try and cover up their involvement. They paid "hush" money to keep it quiet. They tried to use the CIA to block the FBI's investigation. They invoked "national security" and "executive privilege" to shield themselves from the investigation. And they lied under oath to Congress.

5. Why did President Nixon put recording devices in his office?

President Nixon had installed recording devices in the Oval Office so that historians could study his presidency.

6. According to the article, why did Mark Felt talk to Woodward?

In 1992, journalist James Mann cited Felt as a suspect in an article for The Atlantic Monthly, in which he theorized that Deep Throat's motive was to defend the institutional power and integrity of the FBI.

Felt spent more than 30 years at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and was devoted to its legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover. When Hoover died in May 1972, President Nixon went outside the agency for a new chief. Hoover had spent decades telling presidents what to do. Suddenly, veterans like Felt were being told what to do by the Nixon White House, and did not like it, according to Mann.

John O'Connor friend of the Felt family, who wrote the Vanity Fair article said Felt was a whistleblower who thought what President Nixon had done was wrong. "He sees this as a way to honor all the people below him who served in the Bureau and were incorruptible through a very, very tough time in our nation's history," he said.

Discussion Questions (more research might be needed):

1. Do you think Mark Felt was a hero, or a traitor? Give examples why different people might have different views of his actions.

2. Recently, anonymous sources cause problems for Newsweek magazine and other news organizations. Bernstein said: "This is a case history and a case lesson of why it is so important that we have confidential sources. If you were to look back at the original stories, I think hardly any of them had named sources. There's no way this reporting could have been done, nor is there any way that good reporting at a lot of places can be done, without anonymous sources."

Do you agree? How should reporters use anonymous sources?

3. What effects did the Watergate scandal have on American politics? Does Mark Felt's admission change the way you think about what happened during that era?

Send your answers, in essay form, to extra@newshour.org for possible publication!