Andrew McCarthy has the lowdown:

You heard that this was the crime of the century. A sort of Robert-Hanssen-meets-Watergate in which [Karl] Rove is already cooked and we’re all just waiting for the other shoe — or shoes — to drop on the den of corruption we know as the Bush administration. That, after all, is the inescapable impression from all the media coverage. So who is saying different?

The organized media, that’s who. How come you haven’t heard? Because they’ve decided not to tell you. Because they say one thing — one dark, transparently partisan thing — when they’re talking to you in their news coverage, but they say something completely different when they think you’re not listening.

McCarthy points us to the MSM’s amicus brief filed four months ago in support of Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper:

Though you would not know it from watching the news, you learn from reading the news agencies’ brief that the 1982 law prohibiting disclosure of undercover agents’ identities explicitly sets forth a complete defense to this crime. It is contained in Section 422 (of Title 50, U.S. Code), and it provides that an accused leaker is in the clear if, sometime before the leak, “the United States ha[s] publicly acknowledged or revealed” the covert agent’s “intelligence relationship to the United States[.]”

As it happens, the media organizations informed the court that long before the [Bob] Novak revelation (which, as noted above, did not disclose Plame’s classified relationship with the CIA), Plame’s cover was blown not once but twice. The media based this contention on reporting by the indefatigable Bill Gertz — an old-school, “let’s find out what really happened” kind of journalist. Gertz’s relevant article, published a year ago in the Washington Times, can be found here.

Read the whole thing.

I think it’s time to contact the New York Times ombudsman, Byron Calame, and ask why we haven’t read about this in his newspaper:

• E-mail: public@nytimes.com
• Phone: (212) 556-7652
• Address: Public Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036-3959

Update: While you’re writing the New York Times, be sure to mention this, too.

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