Journalists & the 1st Amendment

The editors at the Wall Street Journal are not very happy with their counterparts at the New York Times.

In the recent annals of press freedom, there are few more regrettable...than...a December 31, 2003, editorial in the New York Times. The special counsel that the Times was cheering on, Patrick Fitzgerald, is now threatening a Times reporter with jail, and in a way that jeopardizes the entire press corps....

The bitterest irony here is that this case should never have been investigated in the first place. Ms. Plame is the wife of Joseph Wilson, the CIA consultant who wrote a July 2003 op-ed in the Times accusing the Bush Administration of lying about yellow cake uranium ore from Niger. The allegation became a political cause celebre at the time, though a year later both a British and a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee probe found that the White House had been accurate and that Mr. Wilson was the one who hadn't told the truth.

Something about barnyard fowl and roosting at home comes to mind, but it will likely extend far beyond the Times' coop.

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