Reporting so good it's

THERE are a lot of ways to react to the annual award of the Pulitzer Prizes, which occurred this week.

You could congratulate the winners -- fulsomely or, as is often the case, through the gritted teeth of a strained smile. You could argue angrily that work more worthy should have won. You could shrug in weary indifference and get on with more important things, like moisturizing the cat. You could quite sensibly ignore the whole thing.

This year, though, there was another reaction -- one that speaks in a particular way to this nation's extreme polarization and to the new realities of doing journalism in such an environment.

A number of prominent commentators called for jailing three of the prize winners.

What's interesting about these demands is that they didn't come from people normally dismissed as part of the lacy fringes of the lunatic extreme but from analysts actively involved in the mainstream's public conversation, albeit from the ideological right.

The targets of their outrage are three journalists who rendered extraordinary public service this year. New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau won a share of the national reporting prize for exposing President Bush's approval of warrantless domestic wiretaps by the National Security Agency. Dana Priest of the Washington Post was awarded the prize in beat reporting for stories documenting the CIA's operation of clandestine foreign prisons where terrorists -- and those suspected of terrorism -- are tortured.

Reliable reporting on the intelligence agencies' clandestine activities is among the rarest of journalistic achievements. Providing it while lawmakers and, more important, the electorate still have an opportunity to act on the information is rarer still. That may be why former Republican Cabinet secretary William J. Bennett, now a television and radio commentator, used his talk show Tuesday to argue that Priest, Risen and Lichtblau were only "worthy of jail."

According to Bennett, the three "took classified information, secret information, published it in their newspapers, against the wishes of the president, against the request of the president and others that they not release it. They not only released it, they publicized it -- they put it on the front page, and it damaged us, it hurt us