The WSJ edit board on what the press has brought upon itself:

The deepest damage from these leak frenzies may yet be to the press itself, both in credibility and its ability to do its job. It was the press that unleashed anti-leak search missions aimed at the White House that have seen Judith Miller jailed and may find Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen facing subpoenas. And it was the press that promoted the probe under the rarely used Espionage Act of “neocon” Defense Department employee Lawrence Franklin, only to find that the same law may now be used against its own “whistleblower” sources. Just recently has the press begun to notice that the use of the same Espionage Act to prosecute two pro-Israel lobbyists for repeating classified information isn’t much different from prosecuting someone for what the press does every day–except for a far larger audience.
We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job. But then that’s part of the reason we didn’t join Joe Wilson and the New York Times in demanding Karl Rove’s head over the Plame disclosure. As for some of our media colleagues, when they stop being honest chroniclers of events and start getting into bed with bureaucrats looking to take down elected political leaders, they shouldn’t be surprised if those leaders treat them like the partisans they have become.

Somebody needs to e-mail this editorial to Bill Keller:

Keller asserted that “there’s sometimes a vindictive tone in the way [administration officials] talk about dragging reporters before grand juries and in the hints that reporters who look too hard into the public’s business risk being branded traitors.” He warned that journalists possibly are “suffering a bit of subpoena fatigue. Maybe some people are a little intimidated by the way the White House plays the soft-on-terror card. Whatever the reason, I worry that we’re not as worried as we should be.”

That’s Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times — the paper that called for the investigation that led to its own reporter’s jailing. The paper that exposed the NSA terrorist surveillance program even after President Bush made it clear that the program was vital to preventing terrorist attacks. The paper whose editorials routinely seethe with anger toward Bush and Republicans and have abandoned principled argument for partisan point-scoring.

This guy has the audacity to complain about a “vindictive tone.” The mind reels.

UPDATE: MediaBistro has published the rest of the Keller e-mail:

I don’t know how far action will follow rhetoric, but some days it sounds like the administration is declaring war at home on the values they profess to be promoting abroad.

Ah. Good thing Keller isn’t prone to using the same ludicrous hyperbole that makes his editorial page a daily laughingstock. People might start to wonder about how his views influence the news coverage.