A couple weeks ago, despite the overwhelmingly obvious stupidity of the move, the Society of Professional Journalists gave Judith Miller their "First Amendment Award" for helping the government secretly smear a critic by refusing to testify against Scooter Libby, even though she actually had testified by the time they gave her the award. Oddly, since Miller seems to be such a hero to them, the SPJ has not rebuked Tim Russert, Matt Cooper or Bob Novak for not going to jail, nor, to the best of my knowledge, have they rebuked Novak for publishing his treasonous column in the first place.

But now this, from the new president-elect of the SPJ:

Are you kidding? Aside from the factual wrongness of this (the Senate went into closed session at least six times during the Clinton impeachment alone), the superficial tone-deafness of the statement is just astounding. Holden Lewis, via Romenesko, hits the important points, so I won't bother to restate them, but can you believe this is our press corps? One of our professors used to tell his Intro to Mass Comm students that the one subject where journalists had as much expertise as the people they were covering was politics; he doesn't tell them that anymore.