I failed to mention in

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I failed to mention in an earlier riff about Warner Home Video's All The President's Men double-disc special edition DVD that it contains three brilliant mini-documentaries by Los Angeles-based documentarian Gary Leva, and that two of these are especially valuable and noteworthy because they're serious looks at the state of U.S. journalism today rather than typical celebrate-the-movie puff pieces. They're basically about how journalism has gone downhill since the days of Watergate and, by implication, how attempts to muscle journalists under the Bush administration are just as bad if not worse today than they were under the Nixon administration in the early '70s. "Woodward and Bernstein: Lighting the Fire," which runs 18 minutes, is an indictment of the current chicken-hearted state of corporate- controlled journalism, which a complacent public doesn't seem to care very much about. The scariest remark comes from Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter, saying that if Watergate were to happen today the story probably would have never come out. The second doc, "Out of the Shadows: The Man Who Was Deep Throat," starts as a look at Mark Felt, the #2 FBI guy back then who was revealed last year as "Deep Throat. But it gradually shifts into an examination of the importance of unnamed sources, and how most news stories would just be press releases and pablum without them. Peter Schweizer (author of "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty") laments that Felt never tried to fix the corruption from within. Alter calls this notion a "preposterous canard," explaining that "we simply can't do our jobs without anyonymous sources... people will often not tell the truth if they have to be on the record." Here's an excerpt from the doc's final moments. The talking heads appearing on both docs include Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Ben Bradley, Linda Ellberbee, Walter Cronkite, Oliver Stone, William Goldman and Oliver Stone. I spoke to Leva this afternoon about the unusually political and hard-hitting nature of these docs, and he said "it's always a lot more interesting looking at the issues raised by a film in a broader context...rather than simply in light of the physical production of the film." Leva says that apart from these docs, the piece he's proudest of is one about '70s filmmakers called "A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope." It can be found on the THX 1138: The George Lucas Directors Cut two-disc DVD that came out in September 2004.