Sometimes a news story is so clear, you wonder why it didn't get more ink.

On NPR's Marketplace Thursday, an interview with the former insurance commissioner of the state of Missouri. This, to me, gave him immediate cred -- it is indeed the show-me state, and it's not accidental that whoever wins Missourah in the presidential race wins the presidency. It's the ultimate, practical place, and I've spent a lot of time there.

Anyway, here's the gist of the story. Medical malpractice insurance rates have risen 120 percent since 2000. So this fella, sorry I don't remember his name but here's the link, crunched the numbers. If insurance had gone up so much, how much had malpractice payouts increased?

Answer: pretty much zero.

His summation for the rise? Greed.

Now a flak for a medical malpractice lobbying group disputed the figure, saying among other things that other costs had risen, including lawyers.

Talk about an irony. The conservative fat cat lawyers for the insurance companies, mostly Republican, got a pay raise while the always-blamed trial lawyers, mostly Democrat, saw their contingency fees remain flat.

Another example of political spin not matching the facts at hand (like the canard that tax cuts for the rich stimulate the economy).

While on health care:

-- in 2003, only 56 percent of all American workers were covered by company health care plans according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1989, the figure was 80 percent.

-- the free-market theory behind HMOs are that they keep medical costs low. The CEO of United Healthcare, William McGuire, made $114 million last year according to the Wall Street Journal. Assuming you could cover someone insurance-wise for an average of $2,500 a year, if Mr. McGuire made $1 million a year -- a top 1 percent salary -- then another 45,600 people could have had health insurance.

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I believe in posting when I have something to say. I have nothing to add to the general outrage against the perps who planted the bombs, the world-wide condolences for the injured and the dead, and the sadness I saw in British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He stood at a moment pregnant with high ideals -- the G8 Summit -- and instead had to deal with the lowest forms of human life.

When Bill Clinton took office, George Bush The First, told him it was great to make plans and hold ideals but to always remember "the world gets in the way."

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Here's one for you -- New York Times reporter Judith Miller is in the same jail as 9-11 terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.

She's in jail for a story she never wrote while the person who wrote the story is free to have lunch with his Republican fat-cat buddies.

She's in jail for not revealing a source related to the Bush Administration, an unbelievable irony considering the Bush Administration leaked lie after lie to her about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Thirty-one states plus the District of Columbia shield reporters from revealing their sources, and another 18 states incorporate that protection as part of their state constitutions. Congress, apparently pre-occupied with flag-burning, Terry Schiavo and tax breaks for their rich contributors, has never bothered to enact a federal shield law for reporters.

I know reporters aren't popular right now, and I know that most people don't see the importance of confidential sources in a reporters quest for the best available version of the truth. That doesn't surprise me, considering how few Americans can even tell you what the First Amendment covers.

My theory? It's a backlash against reporters for not being patriotic.

Actually, of the hundreds of reporters I've known in my life, they are very patriotic people -- just not in the boosterish, World War II kind of way many people expect. It's a reporters job to raise hell.

Quick example. A year or so after Doug Wilder left office as Virginia's governor, I had a chance to sit next to his former chief of staff at a baseball game. "Man," I told him, "your boss did a helluva job."

The guy looked completely stunned. "I thought you hated him," he said.

"Just doing my job," I shrugged.

So for all those people who don't believe Judith Miller's jailing is no a big deal, for all the people who are satisfied with official government statements, let me close with a quote from Winston Churchill: "Truth is so precious, sometimes it needs a bodyguard of lies."

When Jessica Lynch was rescued in Iraq, the Pentagon lied about the details. When Pat Tiillman was killed in Afghanistan, the Pentagon lied about the details. This is an outrage that everybody with a "Support Our Troops" sticker should be howling about -- how dare the Pentagon try to invent heroes when there are real heroes on the ground every day.

Skepticism is vital in today's media-saturated environment, and that skepticism starts with a free press that can actually make a difference.

The first step in that direction is getting Judith Miller out of jail, and here's why. The prosecutor in the case said no one in America -- no one -- can be guaranteed complete confidentiality.

This is complete nonsense. Lawyer-client conversations are privileged, clergy-parishioner conversations are protected, doctor-patient conversations are private -- and in state courts, so are reporter-source conversations.

When a prosecutor isn't telling the truth, somebody has to stand up and say it.

Free Judith Miller.

Now.

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You've probably seen the recent stories on the shark attacks in Florida, and you've probably seen the experts use the same word over and over in describing them.

Rare.

Pardon me if I quibble.

While politicians and large segments of the general public cling to polite disbelief and denial about global warming, evidence mounts all around us on man's impact on the environment.

For those paying attention, there has been story after story about the over-fishing of the oceans. Some studies are high-tech, some decidedly simple. Case in point: the trawlers that have 100-hook lines used to routinely end the day with 50 to 60 fish per line. Nowadays, the average is 10.

If there's less food for the sharks, they will travel farther to find it, and that includes coming closer to shore.

People are food, too.

My second-favorite media peeve in this regard is the term "100-year storm" or "100-year flood." Modern development has rendered this term utterly meaningless, but it's still used with great authority.

Here's why the "100-year" term needs to be retired.

An impervious surface is a surface that water cannot penetrate. Concrete, asphalt, pavement, roof shingles -- when rain hits these things, it runs off. When rain falls on trees, grasses, dirt, sand, it soaks in.

The amount of permeable American land mass that has been replaced by impervious surfaces is staggering, especially in the last few decades. The amount of land under tree cover in the Atlanta area, for instance, dropped from 57 percent to 30 percent in just 21 years (from 1972 to 1993) according the group American Forests.

Atlanta is not alone -- the development around Seattle is even worse -- and all that water has to run somewhere.

In my Virginia Beach neighborhood, where the housing bubble is measured in three-story, cookie-cutter condos, the tiniest amount of rain produces street flooding. Little duplexes with tidy yards have been replaced by 6,000 square foot monsters; lots where 50 percent of the space used to absorb water are now 80 to 90 percent roofs or concrete.

This is a classic economic example where the profits are private (the realtor, the builder, the speculator) and all the costs (flooding) are societal, but that's a column for another day.

So when it comes time to go swimming in the ocean this summer, remember back to 9-11, remember back to when folks were saying if people stopped flying, the terrorists would win.

If you stop swimming, the sharks win, the tourist dollars dry up, and real estate values plummet.

Sure wouldn't want to have that on your conscience, would you?

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Folks, I know the press is taking a beating these days, and that in today's media landscape, the end result of Watergate (a continuing criminal enterprise being shut down by public exposure) would just flat never happen. I can hear the Fox News bumper music and graphics right now: "Attack on the Presidency."

But even if you don't like big media, even if you hate anonymous sources, let me tell you as someone who spent 16 years in the news business that being able to withhold a name is absolutely crucial to being able to print the best possible version of the truth.

And to that regard, please stop reading Time magazine.

Now I know Newsweek, its main competitor, just got a story famously wrong, maybe not as wrong and maybe not as deadly wrong as commonly believed, but that's a quibble here. Time magazine has just caved in to legal pressure to reveal its sources and keep one of its reporters out of jail.

Memo to Time reporter Matthew Cooper: going to jail for principle is cool. Have some nads, lad.

For those who haven't paid much attention to the case of the outed CIA agent (an outing prompted by her husband's criticism of the Bush Administration's rush to war in Iraq) here's the deal: It's a crime to blow the cover of a CIA agent. The criminal is not the reporter, but the person who actually blows the cover.

After a year and a half of investigation, the FBI has not charged the leaker of the information -- cynically not surprising, since it was likely a high-level Bush Administration official. The man -- the douchebag to use Jon Stewart's term -- who actually reported the outing, columnist Robert Novak, won't even say if he's been contacted by the feds and is walking around free.

But a reporter who didn't even write a story -- Judith Miller of the New York Times -- is now facing jail time for not telling the prosecutors the identity of her source in the matter. It was Miller and Cooper facing jail time, but that was before Time realized they publish a magazine without a spine.

Please remember that 49 states and the District of Columbia protect reporters from revealing their sources.

The idea that a free press is a critical check to runaway federal power is not a radical idea.

Unless you work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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Mr. Marshall is a reporter turned Web editor who lives three blocks away from the Chesapeake Bay.