One of the great emblematic moments in what must inevitably be called postmodern journalism came last month when, having published an anonymously sourced report that Kenneth Starr was considering indicting President Clinton, The New York Times then proceeded to editorialize against the Independent Counsel—for leaking! “But … But … ,” we stammer, “he leaked (if he leaked) to you. You published the leak. If you thought this was, in the words of the editorial, an ‘apparent effort from the office of Kenneth Starr … to spark a debate over criminal prosecution of the President at a time when the Senate deserves a calm decision-making atmosphere and an open field for negotiation’ and that, further, such an effort was deplorable, why did you, The New York Times, the world’s schoolmistress in political ethics, make yourself complicit in it? If it was wrong or injudicious for the thing to be done, how can the Times ignore its own essential part in the doing of it?”

Needless to say, the Times does not ask itself any of these questions. And indeed we must suppose that it is scarcely able to conceive of them, given the bedrock assumption of postmodern journalism that right and wrong do not apply to journalists where they might interfere with the getting or publishing of a story. The only moral absolutes are that every story must be published and every source protected. “The issue of who leaked news of Mr. Starr’s indictment research to The New