But the public's baleful view of the press is not totally without merit. Media insiders have become so obsessed by their own internal debates and so mesmerized by their own pseudo-professional codes of conduct that they've failed to notice how badly they've lost the public trust. The Times' near-sanctification of Miller upon her imprisonment is a perfect case in point. While the paper's profile of Miller finally, in backhanded fashion, connected her name to reporting on "supposed weapons of mass destruction" -- something that never happened in the Times' wobbly May 2004 apology for its Iraq coverage -- it also seemed like a transparent attempt to rehabilitate her image with the paper's moderate-to-liberal base.

The problem is that the journalistic establishment has no way of dealing with someone like Miller, who screwed up massively, but did so within the rules the profession has set for itself. Unlike the far less significant case of Jayson Blair, who became the subject of an enormous ritual purification exercise, Miller reported what she thought was the truth. She was led astray, one presumes, by some combination of ideological bias and journalistic hubris. The scary part about that -- the part the Times has never even tried to confront -- is that if a skilled veteran reporter like Miller can get so thoroughly hustled out of her shorts by a White House bagman, then exactly who in the media can we trust? One letter writer from New York stated this plainly: "If reporters and editors are wondering why the public has lost much of the respect for the media that they once received, they need to investigate no farther than Judy Miller."

A constant tide of right-wing complaints about the media's alleged liberal bias has also taken its toll on mainstream institutions like the Times, CNN and CBS News, which have tried to triangulate toward some ever-receding middle point in the political discourse. Like so much that the media does, this intellectually empty strategy is based on a misreading of public intelligence; Americans may be increasingly cynical, and not well-informed as a whole, but they're also not dumb. The right will of course continue to discern traces of "cultural elite" snobbery in mainstream media coverage, while the left will feel that the press has abandoned critical thinking and capitulated to mindless nationalism. For once, both sides will be right.

Even Monday's extraordinary White House spectacle, in which the press corps savaged press secretary Scott McClellan over the administration's hypocritical handling of the Rove-Plame affair, was really just another example of pack mentality in action. Sure, it's encouraging to see White House reporters behaving as if they might theoretically possess some stones, no matter the circumstances. But it's easy to play Woodward-and-Bernstein with a colleague in jail and a presidency now perceived as being on the ropes. These are the same guys and gals who spent four years dutifully copying down everything McClellan and Ari Fleischer said and telling us it was true; only the script has changed. Their anger seemed a measure of the tragically misplaced trust they had put in the Bush White House to always tell the truth.

Then there's the fact that a great deal of journalism basically has become "The View." The public may be forgiven for "not giving a shit" if the media establishment wants to wrap itself in the First Amendment with one hand and bleat about our precious freedoms while dispensing stories about shark attacks and Natalee Holloway with the other. It's not necessarily clear that a press engaged in a tabloid-esque race to the bottom, consumed by sensationalist pseudo-stories, nuggets of McNews and flag-waving rhetoric, is a free press in any meaningful sense of the term.

There's no quick-fix solution available for any of this; it's not like we can, or even should, swear off Paris Hilton and Tom Cruise forever, ditch the snazzy color graphics and go back to the mostly imaginary era of so-called serious journalism. Good reporting, solid writing and sound critical thinking are not limited by genre or topic; I suspect that Salon's TV critic, Heather Havrilesky, has more to say about the state of contemporary America than your average dozen earnest lefty bloggers. The problem is not "hard" vs. "soft" news, but canned and conventional infotainment vs. courageous reporting and independent thinking.

Nor do I think that the public wants us to dispense condescending lectures about Tom Paine and the First Amendment mixed into the Sunday funnies, or wants to sit still for public forums where journalists mull the value and risks of anonymous sourcing, or debate exactly how Judy Miller became Ahmed Chalabi's stooge. But I do believe that journalists have to become more self-critical and more willing to listen to outside criticism -- from readers, from the bloggers who zealously pick apart our deadline-frazzled copy, from whomever -- even when it violates the semi-professional norms we have so pretentiously internalized.

Frankly, if we want the public to respect our constitutional rights, we have to defend them by doing our jobs better and by explaining ourselves better. As a reader from California, who felt he had to read between the lines of Salon's Miller coverage for the real story, put it, "Whatever is happening here, I expect more accurate interpretation of all the nuances involved -- about the media, by the media, and for the American public. This is not my job, it's yours. And I expect you to do it."

My interpretation of the Miller case is that like the Skokie affair it's a kind of test. If you can't resist the feeling that Miller is being punished for her sins by a God who moves in mysterious ways, hey, I'm right there with you. Shed no tears for Judy. But this is a classic case of the poisoned chalice -- tastes great now, kills you later. The price we will all pay for this karmic redistribution of justice is not going to be worth it in the long run.

But it's only fair to let readers have the last word. After our second boatload of anti-Miller letters, Mark Hughes Cobb of Alabama responded in disbelief: "Absolutely amazing. Salon letter-writers who disdain freedom of the press. Perhaps a little reading of the Bill of Rights (certainly not a re-reading in any of these cases) would be helpful. The free press belongs to everyone; not just the New York Times, not Time, and not even to Salon and the blogosphere. If an out-of-control special prosecutor decides to come after your comments next, I'll be sure and write in with scathing remarks on your unfitness to wield freedom."

A student journalist from San Francisco, Daniel Jimenez, was more sad than angry, but his questions capture why even those in the media who believe Judith Miller did immeasurable damage to our profession don't think she belongs in jail. "Do we really want to add the United States to the list of nations whose governments use their power to punish political opponents, including perceived enemies in the media?" he asked. "Do we want the penalty for bad reporting, or at the least, falling victim to deceptive sources, to be not a correction or professional censure, but prison?"

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