I don't think there's much doubt that, in terms of law enforcement we are headed down a path that will lead to the prosecution of a journalist for publishing something classified.  My guess is that the first target will not be a strictly mainstream journalist, but I could be wrong about that.  It will almost certainly be a target that doesn't have much public sympathy.  It's not going to be somebody who has revealed unmitigated wrongdoing.  The Attorney General, whoever it is that first goes down this path, will want to contend with at best, a divided public.

The ideal target will have revealed something secret but of debatable public good.  This is what Walter Pincus has to say, justifying the Department of Justice's end run around the Associated Press in pursuit of its phone records:

"The reality is that this is not a whistleblowing case. There are no heroes here, and the press in this instance was not protecting individuals trying to expose government malfeasance."

I remember this argument well from the Judith Miller days.  Miller went to jail in protest of a judge's order that she reveal the dentity of a confidential source.  As Miller was especially unpopular with the left and the left is the most likely group to protest for press freedoms, she was hung out to dry.  Forget the promises she made, we were told.  She wasn't doing public interest journalism.  She was, at best, a crony to her sources.  She was, at best, wrong and at worst lying about Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Man, did we ever hate Judy Miller.

Now, a different Justice Department is going after another reporter we can all hate -- James Rosen of Fox News.  Fred Kaplan at Slate says that Justice's description of Rosen as "“an aider, an abettor, and/or a co-conspirator”" is, "...someone who might be indicted under the Espionage Act."

As with the unpopular Judy Miller, I am not getting a lot of left wing sympathy for the AP and certainly not for Rosen.  I get it.  The press has had some spectacular failures of late (Iraq and the Financial Crisis, especially) and has not earned its right to high minded appeal of its importance.

I am also sensing, though, something of a progressive acceptance of authority here.  Not to pick on Josh Marshall too much, but he has set the tone of discussion over at TPM and that tone has been -- well, skeptical of press whininess.  A lot of times, Josh isn't saying this himself.  He's linking to Pincus.  He's printing letters from readers who are defending the leak investigations and calling into question the value of any reporting potentially lost from all of this.  As a result, I have participated in discussions there where folks are making breathless use of phrases like "oath of office," and I have to wonder... who in the heck am I debating with?

Some of this is, no doubt, because it's "our" president now and so a lot of us are not going to jump in with a bunch of Republicans to criticize his Justice Department, especially when those Republicans always circle ranks when their own side is in power and does the exact same thing.  This is just like when we weren't going to go all in defending Miller at the expense of Valerie Plame.

To me, though, it was true during the Bush years and is true now that the government has taken things too far in this regard.  The government's attempts to investigate leaks from within should not extend to the press.  It's too much and we are all getting too used to it.  Slippery slopes, Michael Wolraich has warned convincingly, are not the best basis for making policy.  But it seems to me that we have already lost a lot of ground on this issue and I don't see anyone digging in their heels.

ADD:

Josh with a more polished take here.

One thing that concerns me: Josh argues that Rosen wasn't really accused of a crime. DOJ just said it to a judge in order to get a warrant to peak at his emails.  Rosen was never even inconvenienced.

Nor, however, was he given a chance to argue against letting the government snoop into his private affairs.  This is the same argument that Pincus makes about the AP.  DOJ went to the phone company in order to avoid a court battle with the AP.  Pincus says that's good.  I say it's an end run.