I still haven't seen the latest "Star Wars," but I'm glad to see that the brilliant Mark Steyn has made it relevant to the pressing political and religious issues of the day:

....''Revenge of the Sith'' is a marvel of motivational integrity compared to ''Revenge of the Felt,'' the concluding chapter in that other '70s saga, Watergate. Before the final denouement last week, there were a gazillion guesses at the identity of ''Deep Throat,'' but all subscribed to the basic contours of the Woodward and Bernstein myth: that he was someone deep in the bowels of the administration who could no longer in good conscience stand by as a corrupt president did deep damage to the nation. So Darth Throat, a fully paid-up Dark Lord of the Milhous, saved the Republic from the imperial paranoia of Chancellor Nixotine by transforming himself into Anakin Slytalker and telling what he knew to the Bradli knights of the Washington Post.

Now we learn that Deep Throat was not, in fact, Alexander Haig, David Gergen, Pat Buchanan or Len Garment, but a disaffected sidekick of J. Edgar Hoover, an old-school G-man embittered at being passed over for the director's job when the big guy keeled over after half-a-century in harness.

Hmm. Like the ''Star Wars'' wrap-up, ''How Mark Felt Became Deep Throat'' feels small and mean after three decades of the awesome dramatic burden placed upon it. The nobility of the Watergate myth -- in which media boomers and generations of journalism school ethics bores have sunk so much -- seems cheapened and tarnished by this last plot twist.

It was after Nixon was exiled, after my brief journalism career was aborted, and after the movie of All the President's Men--a commercial hit--came out that I returned to look more closely at Watergate, but now at the meaning it held for journalists. During graduate school (mid-80s) I reviewed the social science research on the American press, trying to understand what made it the way it was, what kept it from changing into something else. As I followed different leads in my research I would invariably run into the Watergate Mythos, a force field affecting all ships.

Trying to understand this took me right into the religion of journalism-- a belief system and meaning-making kit that is shared across editorial cultures in mainstream newsrooms. Young people are introduced to the religion in J-school, where it also lives, but even if they skip the academies they learn it within a few years on the job.

In the daily religion of the news tribe, ordinary believers do not call themselves believers. (In fact, "true believer" is a casting out term in journlism, an insult.) The Skeptics. That's who journalists say they are. Of course, they know they believe things in common with their fellow skeptics on the press bus. It's important to keep this complication in mind: Not that journalists are so skeptical as a rule, but that they will try to stand in relation to you as The Skeptic does.

As everyone knows, there is a priesthood in journalism. Whether it has authority is another matter. The team of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, and Woodward himself as author and investigator, are comparable to cardinals in the church. (Although Bernstein is seen as an under-achiever after Watergate, Woodward heads the college.) A chain of belief connects them and their deeds to the rookie reporter, to the J-schooler sweating a Masters degree, even to the kid taking liberal arts who joins the college newspaper. (Me, class of '79.)

A young journalist, Greg Lindsay, in his very interesting open letter to the class of 2005 (May 11 at Media Bistro) gets a lot of it right. He noticed in his training an undercurrent of religious instruction. But not very good instruction. "They're desperate to make believers out of you," he writes.

That there is a religion of journalism -- and religious orthodoxy -- explains the obstinate, even irrational opposition to any questioning (much less reexamination) of what happened in Watergate. Actually, reexamination is the wrong word, because a lingering question about Watergate is, simply, what were the burglars doing at the Watergate, and why? For years I heard tales about "bugging Larry O'Brien's office," yet it turned out that no bug was ever installed there (it couldn't have been heard from the listening post if it had been), and the desk and phone targeted by the burglars belonged to one Ida Maxwell ("Maxie") Wells.

To merely inquire about these matters (which were overlooked despite the information being in FBI files) is to risk being called a nut, or to be likened to a Holocaust denier.

Why is that?

Because it would help rehabilitate the evil Nixon? Not by a long shot. Nixon's crime was in covering up the burglary. He was incredibly stupid to do it (and the sexual nature of the burglary, if true, only shows him to be more stupid, not less). Covering up is obstruction of justice, and that's why he had to resign, and why he was lucky that President Ford pardoned him. None of this will save Nixon, and I don't know anyone who claims it would.

Instead, the painstaking research by others which raised questions about John Dean's possible personal sexual motivation of the burglary renders the orginal reporting of Watergate less than thorough (and, of course, John Dean less than heroic). If, as Mr. Rosen argues, modern journalism is a religious cult which arose from Watergate (with Woodward and Bernstein as "Cardinals"), then any questioning of their thoroughness is akin to heresy.

Raising questions about sloppy reporting is heresy?

Well, I'm a heretic and I make no bones about it. When I read Secret Agenda and Silent Coup I was stunned, because I had always assumed that the Watergate burglary involved simple political dirt digging, and to see evidence that it was more complicated than that -- that a media hero had sent the burglars in on his own personal mission -- just shocked me to the core.

Then I saw the fanatical opposition to any consideration of this new evidence. Lawsuits were filed against the authors of Silent Coup, against people who discussed the book's evidence, the book was labeled a "right wing wacko tract," (notwithstanding the liberal backgrounds of the authors), and when the lawsuits were abandoned, dismissed, or rejected by a federal judge and jury, why, the silence of the press was deafening.

It's the kind of reaction I'd expect from a religious cult.

MORE: Here's Daily Pundit's Lastango:

What’s being punctured, one pinprick at a time, is the image of lone heroes acting heroically.