It’s not the crime but the cover-up.” This adage has been so often repeated in the media over the years since its origin during the Watergate scandal that it is likely taken for granted as true by most people, even though it obviously enunciates a doctrine made-to-order for the interests of the media themselves. To the self-styled specialists in uncovering and exposing things which, once uncovered and exposed, can be characterized as cover-ups (covers-up?), such things must be as many and as scandalous as possible in their own right, and without bothering very much about whether or not there has been any crime to be covered up in the first place. We have now arrived at the point where the crime is the cover-up and just because it covers something up, whether the information reserved from the media be incriminating or only embarrassing—or even completely innocuous.

If it’s not the crime, in other words, then it shouldn’t, in basic equity, be the cover-up either. The law should stand in the way of the media’s self-justification for treating people’s natural desire for privacy and confidentiality as a crime and so forcing anything the media themselves choose into the glare of publicity in order to gratify their appetite for scandal—now including the scandal of trying to avoid scandal. But the law has been politicized in the same way—if not yet to the same extent—as have the media and much of the permanent government. During the last Bush administration, the