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April 28th - 6:48 p.m.

Chicagoist has noticed that the wave of comments that flooded the Tribune Web site like the backwash from a swamped storm sewer in response to Howard Reich's March 30 profile of Rachel Barton Pine has mysteriously disappeared. It's possible to post a new comment (I tested the waters), but the old stream has been taken down -- or something. Bill Adee, the editor responsible for overseeing reader boards, said, "It still exists,  just not at the end of the story where it is supposed to be. We are trying to figure out why it dropped off the bottom like that. We found a few other instances where it has happened now that it was brought to our attention."
 
If it exists, why can't I find it? I got back to Adee. "Well, that's the problem," he replied. "A regular user can't find it because it's not at the end of the story."





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Branzburg v. Hayes, the split U.S. Supreme Court decision (1972) generally construed by journalists and judges alike as affirming some sort of reporter's privilege in federal courts.

U.S. Appellate Judge Richard Posner's influential opinion in McKevitt v. Pallasch (2003) telling those journalists and judges they were wrong -- there is no such privilege.

John Milton's Areopagitica (1643), one of the earliest and most eloquent arguments for a free press. Said Milton: "As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye."

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