Sacrifices

I don't envy the task of an editor having to decide how to play the news that one of your own reporters was abducted and murdered, as the editors of the New York Times did in Tuesday's editions in reporting that stringer Fakher Haider was killed in Basra. And the murder of a journalist, or anyone, for that matter, shouldn't really be an occasion for snarkery.

So it is in all earnestness that I ask: If Judith Miller's detention was front page news, why was Haider's death stuffed on Page 10? Which reporter sacrificed more for the New York Times? And which story--reporters who work for American papers being hunted and killed in Iraq for reporting accurately on Shiite militias, or reporters being jailed in America for not divulging information about sources who have signed statements releasing all obligations of anonymity--is more important?