In the wee small hours of this morning, the Washington Post’s website posted (and the newspaper itself printed) an obituary for W. Mark Felt, the former FBI associate director who, in 2005, was identified by himself and the Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as “Deep Throat.” The article, online and on paper, was initially credited to Patricia Sullivan, one of the Post’s obit writers since 2003, and Woodward, with additional contributions from staffers Clarence Williams and Anita Kumar.
These credits remain at the obit as it appears at mobile.washingtonpost.com (and as cut-and pasted at some other sites, as Googling “Patricia Sullivan and Bob Woodward” shows) but at washingtonpost.com itself the obit’s authorship was changed this morning to omit Woodward’s byline. Can Howard Kurtz, the man on the Post’s press beat, or the paper’s ombudsman Deborah Howell shed any light on this? Some of us Watergate junkies want to know.