Plame hall of shame: led, natch, by the New York Times.

THE Valerie Plame affair should not be allowed to recede into memory without an "accountability moment" for the journalists and commentators who bought former ambassador Joseph Wilson's (now thoroughly discredited) conspiracy theories and sold them to the public as fact.

On July 14, 2003, columnist Robert Novak wrote that "two senior administration officials" told him that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was the CIA officer who recommended that Wilson go to Niger to investigate Saddam Hussein's reported attempts to purchase uranium there. Shortly thereafter, Wilson--who had accused the White House of "twisting" his Niger report--started working with The Nation magazine's David Corn to promulgate the theory that the Bush White House had "outed" his "covert" wife in an attempt "to punish Wilson or to send a message to others who might challenge it" (as Corn wrote two days after the appearance of Novak's column).

We now know this theory is bogus, ironically enough because of revelations in a new book co-authored by Corn himself. In Hubris, Corn and Newsweek's Michael Isikoff report that the primary source for Novak's column was former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage--who, along with Novak, opposed the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. Karl Rove--a key figure in Wilson's conspiracy theory--merely confirmed Plame's role when Novak told him what Armitage had revealed. And, even though Armitage's innocuous leak provided the spark for special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's three-year investigation of the matter, the only person charged with a crime is the vice president's former chief of staff, Lewis Libby. Libby stands accused of falsely testifying about his conversations with several reporters, although it is far from clear whether he told these reporters about Wilson's wife or just confirmed what they had heard from others.

Aside from the Wilsons, journalists in the mainstream media bear most responsibility for hyping the conspiracy theories that impelled Fitzgerald's misguided investigation. Those who played some part in promoting the idea that the Bush White House "punished" Joe Wilson by "outing" his wife are too numerous to name. However, a few should be singled out for distinctive opprobrium--starting with the New York Times.

Wilson's campaign against the White House began with a leak to Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and culminated with his own bylined op-ed in the Times; and Times columnist Paul Krugman was among the first to sign on to Corn's theory. In a column published on July 22, 2003, Krugman described the leak in terms identical to Corn's, writing, "Why would [Bush administration officials] do such a thing? Partly, perhaps, to punish Mr. Wilson, but also to send a message."

It was at this time that Sen. Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, started loudly denouncing the leak and pressuring the FBI to look into whether any laws were broken, giving the Times a pretext for treating Wilson's wild allegations as a serious news story. On August 8, the Times published an article by Douglas Jehl titled, "Iraq Arms Critic Reacts to Report on Wife." With Jehl as his stenographer, Wilson accused "those lowlifes over there," referring to administration officials, of taking "some whacks at my wife" in order to "keep others from stepping forward."

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When news leaked that the CIA had asked the Department of Justice to investigate, the Times editorial board criticized then-attorney general John Ashcroft for handling the case himself. While the editorial did not endorse Democrats' calls for a congressionally appointed independent counsel, it suggested that Ashcroft should turn the investigation over to "an outsider, who would serve at Mr. Ashcroft's discretion but could make independent decisions."

Krugman didn't need a trial to deliver a verdict. On October 3, 2003, he wrote: "Mr. Bush knew, 11 weeks ago, that some of his senior aides had done something utterly inexcusable. But as long as the media were willing to let the story lie--which, with a few honorable exceptions, like David Corn at The Nation and Knut Royce and Timothy Phelps at Newsday, they were--he didn't think this outrage required any action."

Almost everything the New York Times published about the Plame leak turned out to be wrong. Nobody tried to "punish" Joe Wilson or "send a message" to other critics of the war by outing his wife. The "lowlife" who leaked her name turned out to be fellow war critic Richard Armitage. Bush wasn't aware of a conspiracy to "take some whacks" at Plame because there wasn't any. And of course, John Ashcroft did indeed step aside and turn the investigation over to Patrick Fitzgerald, who caused a crisis at the paper when he forced Times reporter Judith Miller to spend 85 days in jail for refusing to testify about her conversations with Libby.

The New York Times's coverage and commentary look positively responsible, however, compared with those of MSNBC's Chris Matthews--another journalist who deserves special distinction. In the weeks following Libby's indictment, Matthews repeatedly insinuated that Vice President Dick Cheney had orchestrated the leak of Plame's identity, even though both Cheney and Libby denied it and Fitzgerald found no evidence that Cheney had instructed Libby to discuss Plame with reporters. One night Matthews suggested that, "like the Menendez brothers," Cheney and Libby could have "cooked their evidence ahead of time" to hide Cheney's involvement. When a guest balked at Matthews's grisly comparison of Cheney and Libby to two brothers who had murdered their parents, Matthews added, "I mean, nobody here's guilty of murder, unless you count the war itself and you want to get big-time about it."

Nor did Matthews and his MSNBC confederates spare Karl Rove from their theorizing. The Media Research Center's Noel Sheppard reported that between Karl Rove's final meeting with Fitzgerald last April and the June announcement that he would not be indicted for any crimes related to the Plame leak, the network featured 34 separate reports on Rove's legal troubles, including 15 on Matthews's Hardball. The hysteria reached its peak on May 8 when, on Keith Olbermann's Countdown, MSNBC correspondent David Shuster announced with great seriousness: "I am convinced that Karl Rove will, in fact, be indicted."

Matthews and Shuster did a lot of irresponsible reporting, but fortunately MSNBC is a perennial last-place finisher in the cable-news ratings and so the damage was contained. The same cannot be said of the Associated Press, whose wire reports go out to thousands of news organizations and are reprinted in newspapers across the country. Unfortunately, the AP did no better than the New York Times or MSNBC at keeping Wilson's unsupported allegations out of their reports.

In the case of the AP, it was not one or two outrageous claims that did the harm, but rather the steady accumulation of other misleading claims premised on Wilson's delusions. For instance, in its reporting on the Libby indictment last October, the AP said that the charges "stemmed from a two-year investigation into whether Rove, Libby, or any other administration officials knowingly revealed Plame's identity in summer 2003 to punish her husband, Joseph Wilson, for his criticism of the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence on Iraq." In reality, the investigation concerned whether anyone had violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a law that makes it a felony to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert operative. Wilson added the revenge storyline himself, but it began to fall apart early on, when Novak reported that the original leaker was not a "partisan gunslinger" like Rove or Libby. Nevertheless, as recently as August the AP was still characterizing Fitzgerald's investigation as an attempt to find out whether the White House had "intentionally revealed Plame's identity ... to punish her husband."

Finally, we must reserve a place of honor in the Plame pantheon for Mike Allen and Dana Priest of the Washington Post, whose thinly sourced article on September 28, 2003, put so much political pressure on the White House that the appointment of Fitzgerald was almost inevitable. Allen and Priest quoted a "senior administration official" who alleged that two White House officials had "called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife." The same official told Allen and Priest that the leak was "clearly ... meant purely and simply for revenge."

Three years later, one obsessed prosecutor and an army of partisan journalists have found nothing to substantiate that accusation. The farcical climax of the whole sorry mess--that the source of the leak, Richard Armitage, outed Wilson's wife not for revenge but because he is a notorious gossip--exploded the mad theories of the media mandarins in one afternoon. In a desperate attempt to pick up the pieces and forge a grand unified theory, Chris Matthews asked his guests David Corn and Michael Isikoff on September 8, "Do you think [Armitage] might have been used by people like [Libby]? They put it in front of him knowing he's a blabbermouth?"

It was a conspiracy theory that even Corn, who worked so hard to sell Joe Wilson's story to the public, wouldn't buy.

Mr. Spruiell writes the Media Blog for National Review Online.