At the time, Goldberg brushed off the charge, telling Brown, "Of course, I mean I've heard that too. I talked to other government officials who say they do believe it's true."

Goldberg should have left the passing critique alone. But three days later he was simmering about the treatment he'd suffered at the hands of Brown. Detailing his experience for Slate, Goldberg wrote about his "absurd encounter" on CNN. Where some might have seen an honest disagreement over the story's veracity, Goldberg saw a conspiracy: "As I was led onto the set one night earlier this week, I noticed that David Ensor, one of CNN's on-air reporters, was looking smugly in my direction. I knew that he is often used by people in the national security establishment as their mouthpiece, so I guessed that I was in trouble."

In other words, the whole thing was an elaborate setup.

The dig about Ensor being "used" by his sources was telling, since Goldberg was asked in a separate CNN interview whether he himself might have been used by the Kurds who helped him report the story, even paying for his bodyguards as he traveled the countryside. (The Kurds' incentive? They'd welcome an American effort to overthrow Hussein, who gassed the Kurds during the 1980s.)

As Goldberg himself conceded on camera, "Everybody has an agenda when they talk to a reporter." But apparently when that agenda runs counter to Goldberg's, reporters are being "used."

Former independent counsel Kenneth Starr knew a thing or two about using reporters. During his crusade, Starr befriended a number of Beltway journalists who routinely typed up his spin as gospel. Chief among the alleged culprits was Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post. Dubbed by lefties "Stenographer Sue" (or Steno Sue), she worked closely with Starr's office for nearly a decade. Years later, that alliance came in handy as she co-wrote a book on the impeachment affair heavily shaded from the Starr perspective, "Truth at Any Cost: Ken Starr and the Unmaking of Bill Clinton."

In his own book on the topic, "A Vast Conspiracy," Jeffrey Toobin detailed how, during a crucial juncture of the unfolding Lewinsky saga, Schmidt simply reported "falsehoods that the Starr team fed" her.

"All of this misinformation had a distinct purpose -- to persuade official Washington, and Lewinsky herself, that Starr had a strong case," wrote Toobin. "At the very least, the reporters seemed convinced."

And this, according to the author: "Lewinsky's lawyer Nate Speights recalled with amusement how, after his daily phone call with [Starr prosecutor] Jackie Bennett, the Post's Schmidt would call him and invariably repeat what Bennett had just said to him."

That old history came rushing back when Schmidt recently wrote a piece for the Washington Post about the final impeachment report delivered by Starr's successor, Robert Ray. The piece dutifully repeated Ray's charge that he could have indicted Clinton for obstruction of justice if he wanted, but that Ray had essentially taken mercy on the former president.

For liberal activists at Media Whores Online, who felt the report actually confirmed that the independent counsel's work had been a colossal and costly failure, Schmidt's dutiful spin was too much. So they started dispatching angry, although not threatening, e-mails her way.

As the Washington City Paper and American Prospect have reported, Schmidt, who'd spent the last 10 years getting paid to comb through the Clintons' public and private lives, didn't simply delete e-mails critical of her work, or answer them with a few choice words, as would be any journalist's right. Instead, in at least two cases, the thin-skinned reporter researched the domain names of the e-mail senders and contacted those people's employers. The implication was that employers might want to punish workers for wasting company time while sending politically charged e-mails, as if they'd been loitering on porn sites at their workstation.

When Brendan Nyhan tried to contact Schmidt for his American Prospect piece, she hung up on him. A Post editor did talk to the City Paper and explained that Schmidt was the victim of a "coordinated campaign" that had become "annoying."

More annoying than journalists who can't deal with criticism?

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