The country's leading editorial pages are ignoring the Plame scandal.

Michael Tomasky If you've been feeling that the Bush administration may be skating free of having to wrestle with the Valerie Plame controversy and are wondering why this is happening, let me submit one possible explanation: The major media are putting no pressure whatsoever on the administration, or the president, to do anything.

See, back in the days when our leading journalistic institutions were bothering to do their jobs, there used to be these things in newspapers called "editorials." They demanded integrity and honest government of presidential administrations. They would bellow -- often a little pompously or earnestly, but, on balance, in the public interest -- that, say, President Johnson needed to explain to the American people what he knew about the risks of Vietnam before 1965, or that President Nixon had better come clean about what happened in Cambodia (or at the Democratic National Committee's Watergate headquarters). Back then, editorials thundered.

In the face of a disclosure by the now-infamous "two senior administration officials" that may have put an agent's life and ongoing covert operations relating to weapons of mass destruction at risk, our two leading newspapers scratch their collective chins and muse.