Pllamegate Redux

In a long post, Huffington dissects an attempted defense of Judy Miller. One point that keeps slipping by just about everyone (well, in the MSM) is the following:

The Blog | Arianna Huffington: Vanity Fair's Judy Miller Rehab: Blame the Bloggers | The Huffington Post:

"'Traditionally,' she writes, 'there have been two generally recognized exceptions to journalistic privilege: matters of life and death and imminent actual threat to national security.' But there is a third exception that Brenner conveniently leaves out, an exception spelled out in the ethical guidelines of the New York Times: 'We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack.' This was unequivocally the case with Plamegate. And, as the Times' ethical guidelines make clear, there is a world of difference between sources using confidentiality to blow the whistle on government or corporate misconduct, and sources using it to promote a war -- or to smear a critic of that war."

And that is the fundamental difference betwixt legit and phony whistleblowers.