But
to expect any such swift comeuppance—straight out of All the President's Men—is to gravely misread how the state and the
press do business in the new media age. Rather than lumbering into free-fire
zones of public exposure, White House officials are now practiced hands in
message discipline and Clinton-style semanticizing. That's why the press corps
sniping at White House press secretary Scott McClellan on Monday—putting no
fewer than 35 aggressive (and unanswered) questions to the doughy
apparatchik—signified very nearly nothing. Mr. McClellan is the public point man
for such questions precisely because he can offer no informed opinion. Indeed,
in past exchanges on Mr. Rove's role in the Plame affair, he was reduced to
lying as mind-reading-by-other-means: “I've known Karl for a long time, and I
don't even need to go and ask Karl, because I know the kind of person he is.”

Hounding
a suit as empty as Mr. McClellan's into submission is far from a ringing
vindication of the press' power. Indeed, like virtually everything else in the
ghastly, backwards-spooling Plame saga, it exposes the press' sallow, retiring
weakness in affairs of state. Just consider the other damning revelations in
the e-mail from Mr. Cooper to his editor: the routine deference that a
correspondent for one of the nation's largest-circulation weeklies shows in
toeing the administration's line as it sets about its routine course of casual
character assassination—even to the point of inadvertently compromising
national security by exposing the identity of a C.I.A. operative.

Eliciting
comment from President Bush's senior advisor “on double super secret background
for about two mins [sic] before he
went on vacation,” Mr. Cooper sounds, in corresponding with his bureau chief,
more like a teenager armed with an Encyclopedia Brown novel and a decoder ring
than a reporter determined to uncover the dirt on a brewing White House
scandal.

He continues, obsequiously, to plead with bureau chief Michael Duffy: “please
don't source this to Rove or even WH [White House].” We don't know if this plea
came at Mr. Rove's urgent request, but again, the real scandal here is that any
such request on Mr. Rove's behalf was likely redundant anyway, in the clubby,
exclusive protocols of what now passes for reporting on national politics in
the public interest.

Mr.
Cooper proceeds, indeed, to dutifully recite Mr. Rove's callow spin
job—described, in that same awestruck kid fashion, as a “big warning” that Time should take care not to “get too
far out on Wilson” (i.e., Ms. Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson,
who had inadvertently touched off this whole dismal fracas by writing a New York Times Op-Ed piece contradicting
the Bush administration's assertions that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy
yellowcake uranium from Niger in an attempt to develop nuclear weapons).

This
is not “gotcha” journalism; it's “may I please?” journalism. What's more, Mr.
Cooper's conduct throughout the whole ordeal—holding out for a last-minute
release from Mr. Rove that his lawyer evidently could have obtained at any
time, theatrically describing the impact of his likely imprisonment on his
young son—show how the D.C. press corps' habits of mind have come to completely
mimic the casual hubris of the powerful characters they cover.

Now
journalists as well as Presidents pitch their case for self-exoneration on the
labored, Talmudic interpretation of words and relationships whose meanings are
all too self-evident.

News
of the Cooper e-mail comes, of course, just after last week's sad, ugly
imprisonment of New York Times
reporter Judith Miller. Ms. Miller's imprisonment for civil contempt of court
was less a perfect storm—to use one of the press' hoarier clichés to
characterize a grim convergence of unpleasant events—as it was a brownout, a
distressing midsummer sign that a full power outage is on its way.

The
whole Plame investigation demonstrates the media's ready penchant to seize upon
its own outsize personalities, and gnat-straining sourcing practices, as the
motive force behind events, when the executive branch and its designated
special-prosecutor-bots look fondly on, in appreciative, masterful scorn.

a
jury of journalists

Even
though no one has yet definitively identified the original leaker,
there's no doubt that the
White House was callously acting as only the White House can: simultaneously
setting up journalists as patsies and perps, dealing out Ms. Plame's status
with the agency as payback for Mr. Wilson's criticism of the Bush case for war.

Hovering
far above all this meta-journalistic intrigue, maddeningly beyond reach of any
public accountability, is the figure many journalists view as the affair's dark
prince, the Chicago Sun-Times
columnist Robert Novak. It was he who published the original Plame leak,
reportedly gave testimony before Mr. Fitzgerald's
grand jury, and waltzed off to continue collecting fat checks from the Sun-Times and CNN, which employs him as
a commentator on whatever faux-pugilistic pundit show it is on the perennial
verge of canceling.

Sentiment
against Mr. Novak is now so heated that N.Y.U. journalism chairman and Pressthink
blogger Jay Rosen recently called for the rather poetic punishment of a
profession-wide public shaming of the alleged administration toady: declining
TV appearances with him, pulling the plug on his syndicated column, and
generally treating him like the Lee J. Cobb character in 12 Angry Men, loudly and ineffectually seeking to foist his boorish
scheme of right and wrong on an indifferent world as his jury mates one by one
turn their backs on him.

Just what this case needs: more public sanctimony! While Mr. Novak is a writer much
like Ms. Miller in overall credulity and distastefulness, no one knows what he
told Mr. Fitzgerald's grand jury. At least Lee J. Cobb's colleagues had a
pretty clear idea of what exactly they were shaming him for. Indeed, Mr. Rosen's
campaign turns (weirdly) on the demand that Mr. Novak cease all journalistic
activity until “he explains”—a demand sufficiently self-evident that Mr. Rosen
never specifies what, precisely, the slithery conservative would be owning up
to.

Consider
the irony, for a moment: legitimate outrage over a journalist's imprisonment
for disobeying a grand jury results in a demand for a different journalist to
disobey a grand jury so that he can provide an explanation almost certain to be
self-serving and unsatisfying anyway. But maybe it's not an irony at all.
Here's how Mr. Rosen ends his j'accuse:
“As the judge said Judy Miller can escape her jail cell by finally choosing to
talk, so could Mr. Novak restore his column and TV appearances by finally
talking about his part in the story.”

Mr.
Novak is apparently to be treated by his journalistic peers, in other words, as
though they are sentencing judges. It's a surpassingly odd suggestion. It would
seem far worthier for the press to train its concerted wrath on a figure such
as Mr. Fitzgerald, hell-bent on criminalizing the routine work of reporters. Or
if a boycott is called for, why not one aimed at pusillanimous troll Norman
Pearlstine, the Time editor who
rolled over for Mr. Fitzgerald against the express wishes of  Mr. Cooper. Mr. Pearlstine's actions have
already done immeasurably more damage to journalism than Mr. Novak, in his most
darkly satanic fantasies of ideological control, could ever dream of doing.

Mightn't
it just be that, in cases like these, special prosecutors are the problem and
not the solution? Mr. Fitzgerald has hounded Ms. Miller into jail by recklessly
broadening the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which expressly
states its intent to “exclude the possibility that casual discussion, political
debate … [or] the journalistic pursuit of a story on intelligence will be
chilled …. ” To that end, the act—drafted after former C.I.A. hand Philip Agee
published a book identifying several agents in the field, intending to disrupt
their operations—stipulates that it applies either to officials possessing
classified information that an agent has been active in the field over the past
five years, or that the leaking of such information shows a “pattern of
activities” aimed at the serial exposure of sensitive intelligence operations.

Even
if a Karl Rove or Scooter Libby is eventually fingered as Mr. Novak's original
source, it's far from clear that their actions—while inarguably hateful,
irresponsible and politically motivated abuses of public trust—actually would
meet these standards of prosecution. So, in the grand-jury-propelled traditions
of special prosecutors like Ken Starr, Mr. Fitzgerald has used his legal
mandate for purposes that it was never intended to serve: to harass and
imprison journalists. It's work he clearly enjoys, to judge by the gleeful,
pompous venting he does in his brief pleading that Ms. Miller's final appeal be
rejected. There, he describes his pedagogic hope that Ms. Miller “will spend
months in jail … thinking about whether the interests of journalism at large
and, even more broadly, the proper conduct of government, are truly served by
her continued refusals to obey this Court's order” and eagerly opines,
Fox-style, that said refusals may well be “seen to undercut, not enhance, the
credibility of the press.”

For
what it's worth, Mr. Novak did supply an explanation—albeit still a name-free
one—of the Plame leak for the right-wing Web site Townhall.com back in October
2003, when the leak occasioned its first investigation, a “routine” Justice
Department check into how this security matter surfaced in the press.

Mr.
Novak recounts that he was curious how a vocal critic of the Bush White House
like Mr. Wilson got assigned to verify the administration's yellowcake claims.
So he called a senior White House source—“no partisan gunslinger”—and asked.
The source, Mr. Novak claims, told him that Ms. Plame had suggested her husband
for the Niger trip.

Another
little-remarked irony here is that the White House was, in all likelihood, not
propagating this information, Corleone style, to send the message that Valerie
Plame sleeps with the fishes if her husband continued to sing on the yellowcake
story. It was instead eager to portray Mr. Wilson as a girly-man who had to
rely on his influential wife to get him a job—so eager, in fact, that it
evidently caused Bush hitmen to lose sight of pesky issues like national
security.

The
pettiness of the thing would also explain what, in Mr. Novak's account, is a
striking lack of ex officio coordination:
“The published report that someone in the White House failed to plant this
story with six reporters and finally found me as a willing pawn is simply
untrue,” Mr. Novak declared.

Of
course, Mr. Novak could be lying through his teeth about all this. Yet it seems
at least somewhat reasonable to assume that if he were, the contradictions
would have emerged in any grand-jury testimony, and that Mr. Fitzgerald would,
with characteristic glee, slap some leg irons on the guy and pack him off to
Alexandria. And if one assumes that some credibility attaches to this account,
it doesn't sound much like Mr. Novak's original source could have been Karl
Rove—who is a “partisan gunslinger” in the same way that most of us are bipeds.

It's
hard, at any rate, not to think that, when journalists eagerly adopt each other
as surrogate demons and effigies in this fashion, the White House has gotten
exactly what it was praying for when it set this whole D.C. morality play in
motion: a miniature, gavel-enhanced version of the Grand Guignol conservatives
have stage-managed lo these past four decades under the obligingly vague,
ever-renewable dispensation of “media bias.”

Bias
plaints are always, at bottom, about the symbolism of an individual
journalist's personality: the telltale left-leaning jollities of a Dan Rather
or Katie Couric, the overripe entertainment-world analogies of a Maureen Dowd
or a Frank Rich. They are, pretty much by definition, never about actual issues
or ideas; if Dan Rather is identified as a flaming liberal, that's meant to be
a conversation stopper, not a departure point for a civilized inquiry into just
what this Rather fellow may believe.

It
could scarcely be otherwise, since bias battles began as complaints about how
TV news played up or ignored certain pet narratives at the expense of others,
and personality is what the medium is designed to convey above all else.

As
a strict personality proposition, therefore, bias typically resides in small
tics of self-comportment—the arched eyebrow or pointed asides of anchormen who
almost never write news copy in the first place.

And
no one's eyebrow arches quite the way that Robert Novak's does. To see him is
to imagine a snake's body attached to that condescending, upward-tilting head
of his. And his tongue literally flicks at the entrance of his mouth between
his televised aperçus. As he went on CNN last Friday to (mistakenly) bruit the
gossip that Chief Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist was literally hours
away from announcing his retirement, one half-expected him to announce:
“Because I just now bit his head off in the Green Room, Wolfe … and I'm coming
for you next!”

the smoking gunrack

Reconstructing
the process by which Mr. Novak assimilated Valerie Plame's name into his July
14, 2003, column is supposed to produce a great smoking gun of media bias, just
as the superscript analysis of the faked Bush Texas Air National Guard
documents was supposed to conduct brave citizens, at last, into the dark,
gruesome, truth-distorting sanctums of the liberal mind.

Yet
in each case—indeed, in virtually every case where the bias stick is loudly
shaken to call down the holy wrath of excluded, heretofore-silent majorities—we
are reduced to forensic debate over process for process' sake. So Rathergate
never alighted, finally, onto the political controversy that animated the thing
into being: just what became of Guardsman George W. Bush over those 11 missing
months in 1972-73? It was enough to demonstrate that the media was mad—mad, I
tell you!—to produce something damning about the reviled conservative
incumbent.

There
could be no possibility that CBS segment producer Mary Mapes was simply duped
by the lure of a big story in the thick of an election cycle—as apparently she
had been earlier duped when a 60 Minutes
II segment crew under her direction acquired and aired dubiously authentic
(and anything but “liberal”) video footage of an Afghani Al Qaeda training camp
from fake soldier/conman Keith Idema in 2002.

Likewise Mr. Novak's October 2003 account of the Plame leak—that he simply asked a
senior, not-all-that-partisan official for an explanation of how the Bush White
House sent Joe Wilson to Nigeria, and the source proceeded to tell him—had to
be ruled out from the start in the baroque bias flight from Occam's razor.

And
much more to the point, the content of Mr. Wilson's original charges—that the
Bush administration was so determined to plump the phantom threat of Nigerian
yellowcake in Saddam Hussein's vengeful hands that it deliberately disregarded
his own strong empirical findings to the contrary—are now almost entirely
forgotten.

Eh.
That's just the war. But look—Judy Miller's gone to jail! And that Robert Novak
sure looks sinister, doesn't he? Karl Rove may or may not finally prove out as
the original source of the Plame leak. But he's already got to be very happy
with his handiwork.