Brown Envelopes

A commentary piece in today’s WSJ (by Stuart Karle, the Wall Street Journal’s general counsel) contains this paragraph:

From the WSJ “In Defense of a Press Shield Law” ($) (emphasis added):

That’s the irony of Miller/Cooper. Shielding sources is supposed to enable journalists to report valuable information that the public otherwise couldn’t get; here, deals with sources deprived the public of perhaps the most relevant information: the identity not of Mr. Wilson’s wife, but of the sources. It’s hard to believe that if Miller/Cooper had refused to cloak Messrs. Rove’s and Libby’s identities forevermore the story wouldn’t have gotten out anyway. A brown envelope to a blogger would have served the purpose.

The WSJ is the blogger-friendliest MSM publication that I’ve seen. Their commentators frequently mention blogs, both as sources and as corroboration. James Taranto with his “Best of the Web Today” is a blogger who happens to work for the WSJ, and publishes the blog as part of his job. And this paragraph seems typical of the WSJ’s assumption that bloggers are part of the landscape of news reporting … and occasionally, they’re even useful <smile>.

What’s surprising isn’t what you see in the WSJ. The absence of such things in the rest of the MSM (and I know I’m over-generalizing here, but I believe the point is valid) is what’s surprising. What’s up with them, anyhow? Perhaps they just see bloggers as threatening? Or is that an overly simple way of dismissing their dissing?