Daniel Meltzer in the Baltimore Sun:

I was at ABC News during the Watergate era. Early in the investigation, veteran reporter and anchorman Howard K. Smith had a one-on-one prime-time interview with President Richard Nixon, what was called then a “special.” The day after it aired, I overheard someone in the newsroom ask Mr. Smith why, in their exchange, he didn’t get into the whole Watergate business with Mr. Nixon. Mr. Smith’s reply, which I have never forgotten, was “Well, he is the president.” (Emphasis Mr. Smith’s).

Journalism is nothing if not a quest for the truth. Timidity has no place here. The Fourth Estate has played stenographer to the White House and the Pentagon long enough. Reporting is not just telling the public what the government tells you.

Shakespeare’s Claudius may have been a strong king and committed to the defense of his country. But he had murdered his predecessor and then lied about it. There truly was “something rotten in the state of Denmark.”

If President Bush launched a lethal war, one whose ultimate domestic and global consequences still cannot be foreseen, on the basis of evidence he either knew was false or about which he should have been judiciously skeptical, then in the words of Mr. Bush’s own father, former President George H. W. Bush, “this cannot stand,” and he should resign or be impeached.