Oh, Those Democrat Operatives with Bylines

“Whistleblower cop in Scott Walker accusations paying a heavy price,” Jazz Shaw rites at Hot Air. Note this detail:

They found their guy, in the person of Michael Lutz, a decorated and disabled-in-the-line-of-duty police officer who worked with John Chisholm, first as a police officer and later in the district attorney’s office. One “journalist” at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel got rather personal in rooting out the source.

The feared retaliation was not long in coming. The Journal Sentinel’s Dan Bice, whose “political watchdog” column is titled “No Quarter,” appeared after dark at the source’s home on Sept. 11. Bice’s persistent door-bell ringing and heavy knocks awakened and frightened the source’s sleeping 12-year-old daughter, he said. The noise was so loud that a neighbor came out to investigate the din, he said.

When the source, a decorated and disabled-in-the-line-of-duty police officer, Michael Lutz, came to the door, he opened it a crack to hear Bice demand to know if he was the person quoted in the story. He did not deny it and speaks exclusively on the record in this story for the first time.

Lutz states that he only came forward under protection as an anonymous source because Chisholm had demonstrated what he called a “hyper-partisan” bias against Walker. Since leaving the police force he had obtained his law degree and gone into private practice. The retaliation he feared was that the influence of Chisholm and his allies could affect his new career.

Read the whole thing. As William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection adds in a post titled “Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter accused of harassing “John Doe” whistleblower,” “When I first read Bice’s column, the two things struck me:”

First, Bice seemed more concerned with outing Taylor’s confidential source than exploring the alleged bias behind the Walker “John Doe” proceedings. That would be consistent with the Journal Sentinel’s cheerleading for the John Doe investigations of Walker to continue.

It’s not unheard of for reporters to try to out other reporter’s confidential sources — think of all the attempts to identify “Deep Throat” in the Washington Post’s Watergate coverage. But considering that the Journal Sentinel has relied on confidential leaks from the prosecutor’s office for its coverage of the John Doe cases, it seems more than a bit odd for the Journal Sentinel to be so heavily focused on identifying other reporter’s confidential sources.

Second, the attack on the confidential source seemed unusually personal, digging up long-ago all`ged personal problems in the source’s police career including a shooting he was involved in for which the source was exonerated of wrongdoing.

And as someone in the comments at Hot Air adds:

If you think that reporter was evil, just imagine the reaction the Praetorian Press will have if someone blew the whistle on Obama’s carefully hidden past, for example, his college transcripts, papers, etc.

A cynical person might start to believe that it’s as if many in the MSM are merely Democrat operatives with bylines or something. Too bad that so many actions today’s MSM take do little to ameliorate this suspicion. both big (see above) and (in comparison with above) small.