The indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in the CIA leak investigation was major news. Libby--who promptly resigned from his position as Dick Cheney's chief of staff--is portrayed in the indictment as repeatedly, and deceptively, claiming he learned about Valerie Plame Wilson's classified status at the CIA from reporters. This explains why special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was so adamant about getting reporters to testify.

But after the October 28 indictments were announced, some journalists thought it wasn't so newsworthy. On ABC's Nightline, Ted Koppel devoted only a few minutes to it before beginning a scheduled town hall meeting on disaster preparedness. Koppel offered the following explanation:

"Scooter Libby's indictment today is indisputably a major story. It was the lead on all the television network news programs earlier this evening. It will be the object of banner headlines in all of your morning newspapers tomorrow. As for its real impact on the lives of most American, though, not much. Not really. That's the strange thing about our business, the news business. Often, what seems so important to us, reporters that is, is of little or no consequence to many of you."

This is curious, to say the least. Surely the rationale for the Iraq war is an important topic, given the thousands of Iraqi and American lives lost and the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent. But is Koppel even right about the public's indifference to this story? Probably not — a November 2 CBS poll found 51 percent of respondents found it of "great importance." As Editor and Publisher magazine pointed out, that's comparable to opinion polls on Watergate in 1973. Only 12 percent said the leak investigation was of little importance. It's bad enough when journalists decide that public indifference is a sufficient reason to avoid reporting a story; it's even worse when that indifference exists only in the minds of elite journalists.

But indifference to the story isn't the main media problem. Months ago, Washington Post reporter Jeff Birnbaum told the Fox News Channel audience, "Really, doesn't this sound like an investigation that's gone wildly wrong and is just wreaking havoc on anybody who got anywhere close to it? And it may be over, essentially, nothing. In fact, it likely is." When reporters weren't wrongly predicting the investigation a non-starter, some were attacking the prosecutor. CNN's Lou Dobbs denounced the investigation as an "onerous, disgusting abuse of government power," while Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote, "The best thing Patrick Fitzgerald could do for his country is get out of Washington, return to Chicago and prosecute some real criminals."

Other pundits defended Libby's indictment as a matter of faulty memory. That argument falls flat on its face, though. For that to be true, Libby would have to have forgot about a half dozen conversations he had with other members of the administration about Valerie Wilson's work, and then misremember having learned where she worked from a reporter who says he never discussed Wilson with Libby at all.

Other commentators simply flipped the story's script, alleging the real problem was not Libby's truthfulness. No, the real liar was Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who publicly challenged the White House case for war, an action which precipitated the leak of his wife's CIA identity and the subsequent investigation. Fox News host Brit Hume--after telling African-American colleague Juan Williams that "somebody needs to hose you down"--was still insisting on October 30 that Wilson was the one who wasn't telling the truth: "The smear that you describe is a case where this guy was lying about them and they were telling the truth about him. That's not a smear."

Why do so many in the press want Fitzgerald and Wilson to just go away? Perhaps because this story, as some commentators put it, has no "good guy," no hero to root for. That's debatable, but it's perhaps a plausible rationale. More to the point, however, is the fact that so much of the bogus case for war required the media to act as willing accomplices to this White House campaign of deception. And that's a story many journalists would rather not talk about anytime soon.

Peter Hart is an analyst with the media watch group FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting). FAIR is the New York City-based, national media watch group that offers well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship.

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