Right-wing blogs campaign to "out" and/or kill NYT reporters

The week was dominated by stories about the NY Times article on the government tracking bank records. In spite of the fact that three other papers, including the Wall Street Journal, broke the story in the same news cycle, and in spite of the fact that the president has been speaking publicly about the program for years, the nation's right-wingers went berzerk. Given a platform on cable news shows all week, they went from demanding an inverstigation to calling for the murder of the paper's reporters and editors. The blogs eagerly piled on.

You might recall Michelle Malkin posting on her site the names and phone numbers of some college students who protested military recruiters on their campus. The students then received a number of death threats by phone and e-mail.

The blogs are at it again, after a Times reporter wrote a Travel section piece on posh St. Michaels, Maryland. Cheney and Rumsfeld happen to have vacation homes there. This is public information, and has previously been written about on the reactionary site Newsmax. However, it was naturally construed by righties as an attempt by the paper to aid terrorists in assassination attempts. The only natural response by right-wing bloggers? To post the contact info and address of the reporter who wrote the story, and in one case encourage others to post the personal information of other reporters, including where their children go to school, and "hunt them down."

Maybe mainstream news outlets can calm the lynch mob down by writing a few more articles about "extremist" liberal blogs.