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A formula for unchecked power
For the most part, conservatives and libertarians have cheered the decline of the liberal media establishment over the past two decades.

But if that liberal establishment falls completely - if reporters are threatened with jail for doing their jobs - there will be occasion for second thoughts, as we are reminded that the ultimate enemy of freedom is the unchecked power of the state....

...Without question, the new media in aggregate are much more representative of the true ideological diversity of the country. So what's not to like?

Only this. The decline of the MSM has led to the rise, in terms of relative power, of the federal government. And while the institutional Right might be happy about that as long as George W. Bush is president, surely everyone who leans starboard will feel differently when, say, President Hillary Rodham Clinton sits atop the commanding heights of state power. If a right-leaning Federal Communications Commission can use "decency" as a hammer against Howard Stern today, what's to stop an imaginative lefty lawyer from smashing Rush Limbaugh tomorrow?

But the immediate flashpoint is the case of Valerie Plame, the "outed" CIA agent and wife of a former diplomat critical of U.S. policy on Iraq. In a nutshell, two reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time magazine, were threatened with jail for not revealing their sources and telling a federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, what they learned about Plame from the White House - perhaps from Mr. Big himself, Karl Rove.

The two reporters had tried to invoke traditional "shield" privileges, but Fitzgerald aims to pierce that shield. And the public, for its part, has seemed uninterested in the case. In an era of downsizing and market segmentation, no MSM entity has the resources to wage a long struggle against the government. Cooper has agreed to testify, while the sturdier Miller has gone to jail.

Thus the new landscape: The government is bigger and stronger than ever. The media are fragmented. It's a perfect formula for the government's divide-and-conquer strategy. So the state can curl its fist anytime it wishes, confident it can smash any single one of us, one by one by one.