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By Jack M. Balkin

Virtually every newspaper and wire service has a story today about Attorney General Mukasey's letter to Speaker Pelosi yesterday, in which he refuses to permit the U.S. Attorney to refer the Miers and Bolten contempt citations to a federal grand jury. And yet, as far as I can tell, none of the media sources, nor any of the obvious web sites, contains a link to the letter itself. It's not posted on the DOJ website, nor on the Speaker's web sites, nor on the House Judiciary Committee site. [Of course, I haven't checked every possible site. If someone finds it, please let me know, thanks.]

What's up with that? One would have thought that, by now, it would be pretty much de rigueur for web stories to link to the documents that are the subject of their reports. I suspect that the reason this isn't the regular practice has something to do with the notion that if a newspaper gives its readers the actual documents in question, there will be less reason for the readers to rely exclusively on the paper's own account of the news. Still, in a link-crazy culture, it remains surprising that none of the major news outlets or web sites has seen fit to provide the letter.

Full post as published by Balkinization on March 01, 2008 (boomark / email).