For Whom The Bell Tolls

I don't agree, obviously, with Wizbang's Kevin Aylward that the Washington Post has mostly "depoliticized" its pages, in an item where he was nice enough to link PostWatch.  (It very well may show less evidence of "Bush Derangement Syndrome" than the New York Times; to determine that may require a Vulcan mind meld between my brain and Clay Waters,'  a frightening prospect).

But I agree with his praise of today's editorial, with the hed Rush to Judgment:

THERE'S A RUSH to judgment in the Valerie Plame affair that's a bit surprising. One person already convicted by many of her peers is Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who went to jail for 85 days to protect a source and then agreed to testify. Ms. Miller is no poster child for the First Amendment. The circumstances of her case, as Times executive editor Bill Keller wrote in an e-mail to his staff, "lack the comfort of moral clarity." Questions remain as to why she went to jail rather than accept a waiver from her source that he did not object to her testifying about their conversations -- and why, if that principle was inviolable, she later accepted a waiver to get out of jail.

Nonetheless, it's astonishing to see many in the journalism establishment, and in the media trade press, turn on Ms. Miller not just for questions surrounding the waiver but also for refusing now to identify all of her sources, turn over all of her notes and otherwise lay bare her reporting. Normally these commentators are among the first to defend journalists who seek to protect a confidential source....

Anyone watching this drama has known for a long time that Miller is being used as a punching bag for disputes over WMD and the buildup to Iraq, and Mickey Kaus is right that Miller's objectively pro-war reporting caused resentment in a journalism corps that views the New York Times as "our kind." I guarantee you couldn't have found many letters this one  at Romenesko when Dan Rather was facing questions about the National Guard documents fiasco:

From JILL CARROLL: I am aghast at the last paragraph of Bill Keller's memo to the NYT's staff regarding coverage of Judith Miller.

For the executive editor to say they should continue to blindly stand behind reporters when they "lack the comfort of moral clarity" after all the recent scandals shaking the credibility of that paper is exactly why they keep having these kinds of scandals. It's one thing to stand behind your reporters when they are being attacked by parties trying to intimidate them from reporting uncomfortable truths. It’s another thing to back up reporters making serious mistakes in order to keep the reporter or the paper from looking bad. That will only undercut public trust in our word at the times when it really matters.

When is someone over there going to be held accountable for these egregious violations of the basic tenets of journalism in a way that makes a difference?...