It seems as if everyone wants to be an "insider," a "player." Are journalists finally catching on that maybe for them this isn't such a great idea?

It's not surprising that the press's biggest concern about the effects of Libbygate is the lasting effects on the press. But please, a little perspective.

I don't suppose the NYT's Adam Liptak is the only media thumb-sucker sucking his space-bar thumb over the way "Prosecutor Pat" Fitzgerald busted through the uneasy truce line between government and the press, with its need to maintain confidentiality of sources.

I don't want to say that the point doesn't matter, because it does. Liptak in his piece this morning cites a number of prosecutorial pursuits of journalistic sources that clearly wouldn't have happened before our Pat got the courts to put the squeeze on Time's Matthew Cooper and the NYT's Judith Miller.

And it doesn't matter that Pat himself has steadfastly insisted that it wasn't his intention to open the press up to wholesale disclosure. Liptak points out that at his press conference Tuesday he said, "Resorting to questioning reporters should be a last resort in the very unusual case." And he has pointed out, "The reporters involved here were not just people who got whistle-blowing tips."

The fact is that prosecutors, having observed the success of his tactics, "are going to use these cases as a guide about how to put these reporters on the stand," says Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

As Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at George Washington University, says to Liptak, "We can debate about the motives of these sources, but the chill is as real for the idealistic whistle-blower as it is for the vindictive or malicious political operative."

But still . . .

Is it not perhaps fair to say: "They asked for it"? Especially given the legal reality that there is no automatic legal "right" to protect a source's identity, as the Supreme Court decided 35 years ago in Branzburg vs. Hayes, doesn't the privilege of maintaining source confidentiality come with some obligations?

Let's join Liptak on a brief stroll down memory lane:

Earl Caldwell, a reporter for The Times who was involved in the Branzburg case, would not cooperate even after the Supreme Court's decision, and the government never pressed the point. In 1978, another Times reporter, Myron Farber, spent 40 days in jail rather than identify his source.

"I wonder," Professor [Jane] Kirtley ["who teaches media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota"] said, "if part of it is that Caldwell and Farber were proudly outsiders." By contrast, the journalists who testified at the Libby trial were Washington insiders, and they gave the public a master class in access journalism. It was not always a pretty sight.

"They're not fearless advocates," Professor Feldstein [of George Washington University] said of the reporters involved, "but supplicants, willing and even eager to be manipulated."

No, it certainly wasn't a pretty sight, the display of the Suck-Up School of Insider Journalism that was put on for us. But then, why would we expect the "Inside the Beltway" mentality to work any better for journalists than it does for politicians? Any better in terms of serving the public interest, that is.

Let's not forget that Judy Miller's "inside" sources played her like a cheap kazoo. She made herself a conduit for out-and-out propaganda--disinformation at best, outright lies at worst. In the case of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, that propaganda played an important part in selling a diseased foreign policy that has blossomed into a plague.

What was that phrase Professor Kirtley used about Earl Caldwell and Myron Farber? They were "proudly outsiders."

Hmm.

Of course you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube or the genie back in the bottle. Reporters now have to live with the effects of what so many of the "stars" of their profession have wrought. Still, there might be a lesson in there somewhere, mightn't there?