Lots of Bloggers (including Ed Morrissey, where we found the story first) have already linked to this great piece by Thomas Lipscomb in Editor & Publisher. The title of Lipscomb's piece comes from this section of his essay:

Sherlock Holmes’s key clue to who stole the racehorse in “Silver Blaze” was a dog in the stall that didn’t bark. And something equally odd happened on the way to the Foley firestorm: To date, not a single pundit, editorial writer, or newspaper ran anything, with the exception of the Chicago Sun-Times story I wrote, a St. Paul Pioneer Press column by Mark Yost, and a Washington Times column item.

Clearly Foley was correct in assuming the Right was the only danger to her repetition of the statement that got Eason Jordan canned. The Mainstream Media couldn’t be bothered to cover “Easongate: The Sequel.” And positioning Foley as the gallant defender of the lives of journalists targeted by the U.S. military was inspired PR. After all, Sherlock Holmes’s dog didn’t bark because he was good friends with the thief.

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If the most basic tenets of Journalism 101 are now no longer important enough for the media itself to honor and defend against their own members who violate them, where is the professionalism and the authority that is our main claim to writing the indispensable “first draft of history” – much less its value for sale? And if we lose sight of that irretrievably, who needs us? There are bloggers out there today with more credibility than Dan Rather, Mary Mapes, Eason Jordan, and Linda Foley combined, and their audiences are growing.

Too many people in the "American" media have lost any concept of loyalty to their country -- if they even consider it their country, rather than just their residence.

Yeah, that's right, I'm playing the "patriotism" card. But not the way you think.

Our country is at war. And it's a war in which victory absolutely depends on the Muslim world perceiving it as a war between the U.S and its allies on one side, and fanatical murderous terrorists on the other.

If it is ever perceived as a war against Islam, then we have lost. The world has lost.

So during such a difficult time, even people who think the Iraq War or even the whole war on terror is a horrible mistake still have an obligation of loyalty to the nation that offers them protection, prosperity, and freedom.

I mean, what kind of idiot breaks a hole in the hull of his boat during a storm, just because he doesn't like the guy at the tiller and thinks the storm could have been avoided?

Even if the allegations about Quran desecration were completely and absolutely verified, why in the world would you publish the information during wartime? It's not that the Media themselves regard the Quran as sacred. It's just paper to them. And surely they would have to agree that if such actions might somehow gain the cooperation of a potential source of useful information (though that seems extremely unlikely to me), it would be infinitely preferable to physical torture.

But they dwell so blindly within the cocoon of their sheltered world, where it's just awful for somebody to offend "multicultural" people (though just fine to be openly vicious to American Christians or Israeli Jews), that it doesn't occur to them that they could just keep their mouths shut and avoid damaging America and putting Americans all over the world in danger.

They might even realize that by not reporting this story, true or not, they would save Muslim lives. If patriotism couldn't rein them in, then surely simple humaneness should ... one might suppose.

After all, who benefits from the publication of such a story at this time?

Only one group: People who want to bring down or weaken President Bush and everything he stands for, no matter the cost.

The press isn't running for office. To say that the media culture is unpatriotic isn't a political ploy, it's an obvious observation. Oh, if my words actually mattered to them, they'd howl and scream about my illegitimate attack. But in private, they are perfectly happy to mock patriotism in all its forms. They're only patriotic when somebody says they aren't.

They are loyal to a community -- but it's not America.

It's Smartland. The nation of the newsmedia people. That's where they live. Not in America. These newspeople generally don't even know anybody, apart from "sources," who serves America in the military. Smartland consists of a very different crowd.

I know that crowd. I've heard them jeer at all the values that most Americans still care about, laughing at religious people, at the middle class, at suburbanites, at the poor ignorant saps who don't think correct thoughts all the time. You know -- the citizens of Heartland. Those poor sentimental fools who stood in line to see The Passion and who like Adam Sandler movies and who get tears in their eyes when they see the American flag and whose hearts break a little when it burns.

And yet the irony is that the reason the radical Islamists hate the West so much is primarily because of the unchecked and uncheckable excesses of the Smartish. From Hollywood to newspeople to the soft-subject professors in our universities, the culture that makes people like Osama bin Laden want to blow us up or crush us into dust is the culture of the R-rated movie, the anti-religion intellectual, the glorified abortionist, the babies-without-marriage crowd, and the what-me-worry media elite.

Osama isn't much worried about Christianity. Why should he? If a Muslim converts to Christianity in a Muslim country, he'll just be killed. Christianity, despite our apparent numbers, has been reduced to nothing more dangerous to Islam than a swarm of gnats.

It's a lot harder to keep dirty movies and atheistic Western ideas out of Muslim lands. That's the established church of the West these days -- liberty without responsibility, filth praised as "edgy" and virtue despised as "bourgeouis."

If the Islamists ever ruled the world -- and only a fool thinks that history offers some guarantee against it -- then America's unpatriotic elite will realize ...

No they won't. Whom do I think I'm kidding? They'll still blame it on Bush or the Christian right or the oil companies, because the central tenet of their belief is that their side can do no wrong.

Wow. That sounds just like "my country, right or wrong." Only instead of a country with borders, they have Smartland, the nation of people who know far better how to order the world than those ignorant unwashed masses of voters that keep electing morons who can't pronounce "nuclear."

They're fanatical Smartland patriots. So fanatical they don't hesitate long enough to get their facts right before running a story that seriously weakens America's position in a deadly war that has already blown up the two tallest buildings in the capital city of Smartland. Because they haven't recognized yet that Smartland only exists as a parasite, sucking the blood out of the Heartland that they have such contempt for.

One thing for sure. At Newsweek, nobody better ever say again, "We don't make the news, we just print it."