Doc Searls mentions that Reynolds and Volokh say Novak’s not protected from being compelled to reveal his sources:
Yet two alpha bloggers (constitutional blawgers, no less), Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh, both say Novak is in fact unprotected on the matter.
…which is obvious, but Doc’s fellow professional journalist Ed Cone is upset that Glenn’s not all over the Plame outing:
Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds are just a couple of guys messing around on the web. They are amateurs writing what pleases them. They have no responsibility to their readers to cover the uncovering of Valerie Plame:
That’s all true, and at the same time it is total bullshit. These guys aren’t lawyers for nothing.
To skip the CIA story is to declare it unimportant. It’s a lie to their audiences. Yet Reynolds is devoting limited energy to the matter, Volokh even less.
And Reynolds is defending himself for not sharing Ed’s obsession with a story that’s still emerging:
I don’t have much trouble resisting people’s efforts to bully me into advancing their agendas. What worries me more, in a way, are the friendly emails from people saying that they get all their news from InstaPundit.
Don’t do that! It’s “InstaPundit,” not “InstaNews Service.” And this is, as Eugene properly notes, an amateur activity. I don’t even get to blog all the stuff that interests me — I’ve really fallen behind on space, guns, and even nanotechnology lately– much less stuff that’s important, but that doesn’t interest me.
It appears that Ed Cone is mostly ticked-off with Reynolds for his pointing out that journalists don’t have immunity from the laws that govern withholding evidence and the like, saying “if we’re no different, why don’t you cover what I cover?”
I’m sure that hit counter envy doesn’t have anything to do with it. At all. But the larger issue is that we have a highly partisan guy – Ed – who’s supposed to be impartial, complaining about a highly partisan guy – Glenn – who’s actually more impartial in the present circumstance, even though he’s an amateur journalist.
Blogs are weird things, wherein 90% of the people make the other 10% look bad, to lift a phrase.
Novak’s an old man. Is anybody going to force him to choose between revealing a source and sitting in a jail cell? No.
As today’s Opinion Journal observes, the real Plame story is institutional opposition to Bush at State and CIA. The general public doesn’t care about such things. Plame and Wilson will soon disappear from the spotlight. Instapundit has better news sense than the “pros.”