WELL SAID: Like many, I have pondered the secrecy of reporters' sources being a valuable protection for a free press, and all the virtues that entails. This writer convinces me that the outing of the CIA agent by the Bu'ushists is something else completely:

It's not a question of protecting sources, though. They’re protecting thugs who used their megaphone to commit a very serious crime. ...

If you want to protect the freedom of the press, you need to stand up against goons working for the White House who plant misleading, fake, or in this case illegal information in the press.

During Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein protected their sources to uncover government corruption. During Plamegate the sources are the corruption. Revealing them breaches no ethical line nor breaks any journalistic pact.

You can read it at Miller and Cooper. Of course, I'm radical enough to believe laws prohibiting the revealing of a spy's secret identity are an un-Constitutional prior restraint of speech, but that's just me....