The American Spectator

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don’t hesitate to ask

Keep rockin,

Tony

Two weeks later, Edwards partially confessed, and Times columnist Tim Rutten weighed in:

When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.

Rutten acknowledged that “too many newsrooms, including that of The Times,” were derelict in ignoring the Edwards story. But his column reflected a telling defeatism. By proclaiming the “end to the era” of traditional media, he seemed to be suggesting that those media, including his own paper, were incapable of applying any lessons from the experience of being scooped by the Enquirer—that they were too hidebound to do anything other than “keep rockin.”

If that’s true, one might as well ask if the Los Angeles Times deserves the First Amendment. It’s a silly question, of course—precisely as silly as Shapiro’s op-ed. Fundamental constitutional liberties are not rewards for good behavior or privileges reserved to certain classes of individuals or organizations. They belong to everyone as a matter of right.

The Bill of Rights protects a variety of rights enjoyed specifically by those who are suspected, accused, or convicted of crimes: the rights to due process, speedy, and public trial, confrontation and compulsion of witnesses, and assistance of counsel; and against unreasonable search and seizure, double jeopardy, involuntary self-incrimination, excessive bail and fines, and cruel and unusual punishment.

Would the Los Angeles Times’s editors publish an op-ed titled “Criminals Don’t Deserve the 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments”? They would have to be awfully ignorant to do so—but then again, only as ignorant as they have already demonstrated themselves to be.