Yet it has survived for three years and continues to survive in mainstream media coverage.

The 9/11 commission findings, a Senate committee report and the Novak revelations, which should have been reported as proof that Wilson was not telling the truth but were not, have convinced me that the public might never get the truth about the Wilson-Plame story from the mainstream media. I am even more sure that we will never hear the story of how and why so many bought Wilson’s story hook, line and sinker and stuck with that storyline in the face of various sources of contradictory information over a period of years.

In recent weeks we have seen the story of a woman brutally raped by white athletes at an elite school turn into the story of a district attorney who pursued a case with little or no evidence that a crime even occurred. David Brooks, whose columns were credited by some as providing the tipping point for the change in perception in the Duke Lacrosse rape case, described the stages of a witch hunt. “First frenzy, when everybody damns the souls of people they don’t know. Then confusion, as the first wave of contradictory facts comes in. Then deafening silence, as everybody studiously ignores the vicious slanders they uttered during the moment of maximum hysteria.”

Evidently there is another way the witch hunt sometimes plays out in modern politics and media—especially when the “witch” is a conservative. The stages are the same, but the result is different. As was the case in the 2000 recount, the allegations and accusations come fast and furious. Then, as more facts become known there is some confusion until the truth becomes clear. At the end of this witch hunt, though, the perception doesn’t change. Contradictory facts are not reported with sufficient prominence to override the prevailing conventional wisdom. In the 2000 recount, the myth that the election was stolen remains the conventional wisdom for many, even though the media-sponsored recount, the results of which were released publicly some time after the original story had been written, proved otherwise.

My fear is that the Wilson-Plame story, as it is written in the mainstream media (and possibly in the book and movie to follow), will most closely resemble the latter example.