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By honoring the New York Times and the Washington Post for their work in exposing the Bush administration’s covert and legally dubious campaign against suspected terrorists, the Pulitzer Prize board yesterday signaled a final end to the media’s post-9/11 skittishness with respect to tough coverage of the White House. The media, in effect, reasserted their independence.

Some conservative supporters of President Bush have argued that the Times could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for revealing the existence of the National Security Agency’s secret, no-warrant wiretapping program — an example of journalistic derring-do that Bush himself publicly labeled a “shameful act.” (Bush was specifically referring to the leak that led to the story. But it seems clear that he was referring as well to the story, which the Times had refrained from publishing for more than a year at Bush’s request.)

Right on cue, Scott Johnson of the conservative Power Line blog denounced what he called “The Pulitzer Prize for Treason,” writing that the Times article, by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “clearly violated relevant provisions of the Espionage Act — a particularly serious crime insofar as it lends assistance to the enemy in a time of war.” For good measure, Johnson drew a parallel to Walter Duranty, the Times reporter who infamously ignored Stalin’s crimes against humanity in the 1930s.

Stephen Spruiell, who writes National Review Online’s Media Blog, was more restrained, contenting himself with referring to the Times’ and the Post’s Pulitzers as “highly politicized” awards that were “based on anonymous sources who sought to damage the Bush administration.”

Although I have not yet run across any commentary suggesting that the Post may be in the same kind of legal peril as the Times, there’s no question that Dana Priest’s reporting, revealing the existence of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, has raised precisely the same hackles on the right. And, as is the case with the Times, the leak that led to Priest’s story is under investigation.

What we have here is a situation analogous to the Pentagon Papers. Our two leading newspapers — then, as now, the New York Times and the Washington Post — have exposed government secrets about how the administration has waged war. Then, as now, journalists argued that the public has a right to know what’s being done in its name. Then, as now, the White House and its supporters contend that the press is engaged in acts that are, at best, unpatriotic and, at worst, treasonous.

No doubt we’ll hear that these awards were the work of out-of-touch intellectuals at Columbia University, which administers the Pulitzers. Well, to invoke a Clinton-era cliché, the juries that chose to honor the Times and the Post look like America.

The jurors who picked the Times for one of two national reporting awards came from the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, USA Today, Newhouse News Service and the Dallas Morning News. For the Post, which won in the beat reporting category, it was the Sacramento Bee, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Philadelphia Daily News, the John S. Knight Fellowships, the News-Press of Fort Myers, Fla., the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Orlando Sentinel. Clearly this was not an Ivy League plot.

For the Pulitzer board to cast its lot on the side of a free press yesterday was an important symbolic act that will be invoked over and over again in the ugly legal and political battles to come.

In the interest of fairness: Bronson Arroyo yesterday pitched five innings and gave up five earned runs, including two homers, in an 8-7 loss. Oh, yeah: He also went 0 for 2. But I never said he was a front-line pitcher — just more valuable than Wily Mo Peña.

Karen Guregian (sub. req.) on how good Bronson Arroyo would look in a Red Sox uniform now that David Wells is back on the DL:

As everyone knows, the Sox had a pretty darn good starter-in-reserve, a guy who was 10th in the American League in quality starts last season. But they traded him for someone who played a line drive into a ground-rule double yesterday, someone who’s getting mock cheers when he actually makes a catch.

And this Chris Snow piece really makes it sound like Wells might be finished.

I didn’t want to let the week go by without mentioning a few developments on the “what’s happening to the newspaper business” front. No übertake from Media Nation. Nevertheless, here are a few things you should keep an eye on.

The week began with a perversely fascinating story in the New York Times. Steve Lohr reported that some news services are deliberately sticking flat, dull headlines on the Web versions of their stories so they’ll be more likely to get chosen by the robots at Google News, Yahoo News and the like. Lohr explains:

In newspapers and magazines, … section titles and headlines are distilled nuggets of human brainwork, tapping context and culture. “Part of the craft of journalism for more than a century has been to think up clever titles and headlines, and Google comes along and says, ‘The heck with that,’ ” observed Ed Canale, vice president for strategy and new media at The Sacramento Bee.

“Tulsa star: The life and career of much-loved 1960’s singer” is example of an evocative headline designed for human eyes. The bots’ choice? “Obituary: Gene Pitney.”

Also last week, Christopher Lydon’s consistently excellent public radio program, “Open Source,” did an hour on the future of the newspaper business. You can read a summary and download the audio here. Lydon’s lead guest was Alan Rusbridge, editor of The Guardian, the British newspaper that has become something of an international phenomenon thanks to its well-executed Web version.

Rusbridge made the rather astonishing assertion that The Guardian’s 14 million American readers exceeds the online circulation of the Los Angeles Times. I guess it makes sense; though the Times is a great paper, it’s seen as essentially regional. The Guardian’s frankly liberal orientation, easy-to-navigate Web tools and emphasis on smart but short articles are bound to make it a favorite in Blue America.

Rusbridge made one other observation that leads me to my final destination. Lydon at one point noted that, as publicly owned companies begin to flee the newspaper business, nonprofit foundations such as the one that owns the St. Petersburg Times (and runs the Poynter Institute) may become the wave of the future. Rusbridge agreed, and noted that The Guardian is actually owned by such a foundation.

Yet one of the outstanding examples of such subsidized journalism — the Christian Science Monitor — would appear to be in some danger, as the financially troubled Christian Science Church last week announced a series of moves aimed at putting the church on more stable footing.

The Monitor is a terrific paper with an international focus that has already morphed into a pretty much Web-only news source. (When was the last time you saw a paper Monitor?) The Boston Globe’s Tom Palmer reported (fee req.) on Friday that the church intends for the Monitor to be self-sufficient by 2009 after having received millions of dollars in subsidies in recent years. But it’s hard to imagine how that could happen without seriously downgrading the journalism.

The church would be an ideal patron for the Monitor’s journalism. It’s a shame that its own financial problems may make that impossible.

Pitching lines, season to date:

• Bronson Arroyo, 2-0, 1.98, 13.2 IP, 11K
• David Wells, 0-1, 15.75, 4 IP, 1K
• Matt Clement, 1-1, 9.00, 11 IP, 8K

OK, Wells is coming off surgery and will probably turn it around, and Arroyo will return to earth at some point. But does anyone have a good feeling about Clement?

My friend and occasional collaborator Harvey Silverglate says that the New York Times is up to its old tricks in the matter of professional gossip Jared Paul Stern. Writing in the Boston Phoenix, Silverglate argues that the Times would rather buy into the prosecution’s salacious spin than to consider the possibility that Stern, until last week a columnist for the New York Post, was actually set up by Ron Burkle, the billionaire he’s been accused of shaking down.

Though one might contend that Burkle v. Stern has already gotten too much coverage, Silverglate relates it to some rather more important matters: the persecution of former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, terrible coverage for which the Times later apologized, and Judith Miller’s gullible reports on Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons capabilities and ties to Al Qaeda. Silverglate could have added to that list the Times’ years-long obsession with Whitewater, the Clinton scandal that wasn’t. (The Times’ voluminous Stern coverage is online here.)

Stern himself now says he was the victim of a sting operation in which Burkle attempted to make it appear that Stern was offering to ease up on the nasty gossip items in return for a $200,000 (more or less) bribe. What complicates all this is that Stern was quite frankly looking for Burkle to invest in his clothing company; it’s just that he claims there was no quid pro quo. Earlier this week, in an interview with Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, Stern explained his side of the story:

“On reflection, it was an error in judgment to continue the business discussion about the clothing company” while also talking about “the coverage that he was getting in the paper,” said Stern, who was captured on tape comparing the arrangement he was proposing to the “Mafia.” “I did absolutely nothing remotely illegal and never intended any kind of extortion.”

Obviously, this doesn’t look good: Stern comes off as a sleaze who got caught, and is now trying to slice the salami as thinly as he possibly can. And even though we’ve seen only snippets of a long conversation between Stern and Burkle, those snippets would appear — as Timothy Noah observes in Slate — to be “extremely damaging to Stern.” Noah adds, “One finds oneself wondering how Stern could possibly explain himself.”

To which Silverglate would reply: People in Stern’s position do manage to explain themselves, all the time. That’s why they have trials. It is impossible to get at the truth until we’ve heard all sides of the story. Silverglate writes:

To anyone experienced in criminal law, it is all too obvious what was going on here: Burkle was instructed to try to put certain words into the target’s mouth. Just as obviously, the sting failed: Stern resisted the bait and stuck to his proposal rather than adopt Burkle’s suggestion of a “protection” arrangement. The real story here is the collaboration of the businessman, his private henchmen, and their federal prosecutor and FBI allies to try to set up a sleazy but not criminal gossip columnist for a federal bust. They failed to euchre Stern, but they seem to have succeeded with the Times.

Stern can’t help but look bad because the standards of the gossip world are so low — especially as practiced by the New York Post. It doesn’t help that Stern is apparently as shallow as they come. This piece in the New York Observer will inspire laughs or nausea, depending on your inclination. But as I argued in my earlier item, it’s hard to see how Stern looks any worse than his goodie-grubbing boss, Page Six editor Richard Johnson.

Silverglate’s overriding point is that, however cosmically unimportant the Stern affair might be, the Times is nevertheless doing it again. It’s hard to do much real journalism when your snout is buried so deeply in the government’s trough.

Home runs to date:

• Bronson Arroyo, 2
• Wily Mo Peña, 0

I hear Arroyo can pitch a little, too. Maybe he can play right field.

Along with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, the Iranian regime is the scariest on earth. I’ll go so far as to say it’s scarier than North Korea. As best as anyone can tell, Kim wants nukes to ensure that the world will leave him alone. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, seems like a dead cinch to nuke Tel Aviv as soon as he has the capability. We actually find ourselves in the rather excruciating position of hoping that Ayatollah Khamenei, the real power in Iran and not exactly a nice guy himself, is able to keep the Holocaust-denying hothead in check.

Which is why it was so depressing to read Seymour Hersh’s latest New Yorker blockbuster, this one reporting that the White House is increasingly talking about going to war against Iran, and is refusing even to rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. The generals, according to Hersh, are up in arms at this insane idea. The administration appears to have learned nothing from its tragic misadventure in Iraq.

Indeed, perhaps the greatest tragedy of Iraq is that it has completely hampered our ability to do anything about genuine threats such as Iran and North Korea. Who could trust the White House now? I happen to be one of those who believes that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney did not lie about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities and ties to Al Qaeda; rather, they were the victims of their own insular beliefs. But, in the end, what does it matter? No matter what they say now, it will come off as Chicken Little warning us that the sky is falling. Again.

William Arkin, the Washington Post’s national-security blogger, referring both to Hersh’s story and to this front-page Post article, acidly observes:

A war with Iran started purposefully or by accident, will be a mess. What is happening now though is not just an administration prudently preparing for the unfortunate against an aggressive and crazed state, it is also aggressive and crazed, driven by groupthink and a closed circle of bears.

Sadly, “aggressive and crazed” sounds just about right.

Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan doesn’t seem too worried about the chances of Bush and Cheney nuking Tehran anytime soon, believing, instead, that they are merely trying to scare the Iranians, the Europeans both. But who knows with these guys? Indeed, here’s how Kaplan closes:

[M]aybe there’s no gamesmanship going on here, maybe Hersh is simply reporting on a nuclear war plan that President Bush is really, seriously considering, a “juggernaut” that might not be stopped. If it’s as straightforward as that, we’re in deeper trouble than most of us have imagined.

Did Hersh get it right? His story is, for the most part, anonymously sourced, and as Arkin notes, short on details. Still, who can argue with Hersh’s record? In the opening weeks of the Iraq war, he took a lot of heat for passing along the generals’ fear that the war was getting bogged down in unexpected ways — a concern that seemed greatly exaggerated after the first phase of the war was wrapped up quickly.

Several weeks ago, though, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote (sub. req.) a much-commented-upon column in which he noted that it’s now clear — and, in fact, it was clear then — that the unconventional resistance that U.S. troops encountered during those opening weeks was the beginning of the insurgency. And that the commanders on the ground understood it needed to be dealt with, even if Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks did not. Brooks does not name Hersh, but he should have. For it was Hersh’s journalism that proved particularly prescient.

Last night I caught a few minutes of Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source,” which devoted a full hour to the topic. It looks like mandatory listening. I’m going to grab the podcast and give it a listen tomorrow morning. As Lydon said last night, this is the only story that adults are thinking about at the moment.

Chris Gabrieli was obviously furious with Tom Reilly after Reilly dumped him as his running mate in favor of one-day wonder Marie St. Fleur. But I couldn’t quite understand why Gabrieli would respond by jumping into the governor’s race. Wouldn’t Gabrieli only wind up hurting fellow outsider Patrick and helping Reilly?

Now I get it. WBZ-TV (Channel 4) is reporting poll results showing that Patrick has zoomed from 10 points behind Reilly to three points ahead in the past month — and that Gabrieli’s the reason, as he’s hurting Reilly a lot more than Patrick.

The race is starting to get interesting. The first Democratic debate featuring all three candidates will be held on Channel 4 on Sunday, April 23, at 8:30 a.m. (Ugh.) But now moderator Jon Keller writes that it will be rebroadcast on April 24 at 7 p.m., when it is sure to generate much bigger numbers.

Looks like Adam Reilly is thinking about this, too.

The Boston Herald may not be quite the solid local-news vehicle that it was during the 1990s. But it’s a better paper today than it was two years, the approximate moment that I think it hit its skin-and-sensationalism bottom. And it’s a better paper than I would have thought possible one year ago, when it was getting ready to shed about a quarter of its newsroom jobs.

One of the prime reasons that the tabloid is still worth a look will soon be leaving One Herald Square. Late last month the Herald’s assistant managing editor for business, Cosmo Macero, announced he was leaving to take a public-relations job at O’Neill and Associates. Within days, it became clear just how much Macero would be missed, when the Herald won the general-excellence award in its circulation category from the American Society of Business Editors and Writers. The Herald’s business team was also honored for its coverage of the Gillette sale last year. (The Globe competes in a larger circulation category, and Steve Bailey won recognition as the best business columnist.)

The Herald business section has several good, aggressive reporters, so I expect it will renew itself. Still, Macero was special, and he’ll be missed. I’m late to this, but I wanted to post something before Macero’s last day, which is coming this week.

As for the Herald itself — who knows? Investigative reporter Maggie Mulvihill, who left for a Nieman several years ago, surprised a lot of people by coming back. But now she’s leaving again, this time to go to WBZ-TV (Channel 4) — a huge loss. As we all know, publisher Pat Purcell has put the Herald and about 100 community papers he owns in Eastern Massachusetts on the market. After a flurry of speculation a few weeks ago that he’d decided to sell the community papers and keep the Herald, there’s been not a sound.

Yet the Herald perseveres, with a good sports section, solid business reporting and an occasional local news story that makes you sit up and take notice. (No, not Antonin Scalia’s chin flip. But this, from today’s paper, on ticket-happy troopers on the Massachusetts Turnpike, is definitely worth reading.)

With the Globe experiencing serious financial problems, it’s more important than ever that Boston remain a two-daily town. If the Herald weren’t around, the Globe’s owner, the New York Times Co., would be all the more tempted to hack away with reckless abandon.