Don’t miss Tina Brown in the Washington Post yesterday acting as the official defender of the liberal media as a whole, and that includes Judy Miller, and Bob Woodward, and even, ahem, poor old elephant Dan Rather and his Microsoft Word memos, against the other team, painted in broad strokes as the “fact-free ethical anarchy of the blogosphere”:

Now that everyone’s a moralist, all mistakes are outrages. It’s born of the desperation of Big Journalism’s realization that it has lost control. Mainstream Media are trapped in the pincer assaults of the fact-free ethical anarchy of the blogosphere and the cynicism of quarterly profit-driven conglomerates enslaved to entertainment values. No one wants to be caught without a chair when the music stops.

Remember Dan Rather, the ghost of journalism past? He got it in the neck for the National Guard blunder from all ends — the blogs, the administration, the media and then his own CBS colleagues. The old elephant culled by the herd.

Contrary to some of the postings from the grassy knoll, I believe Woodward when he says he didn’t think the leak he heard about Valerie Plame’s job was important at the time. He probably did see it as gossip, somewhere between macho knowingness and just another routine drive-by shooting from the Bush crowd.