On Sunday, the New York Times’ public editor, Barney Calame, came out swinging, revealing that the newspaper’s management, in the persons of executive editor Bill Keller and publisher Arthur Sulzberger, had refused to answer a variety of his questions about the Times’ handling of its now-notorious expose about the National Security Agency spying on U.S. residents without court-approved warrants. Calame wrote that last week he submitted to Keller and Sulzberger 28 unanswered questions about the story — most notable among them, one presumes, why did the Times hold the story for more than a year, and why did it then reverse course and print the story, over the objections of the White House? (At the end of the column, he informs readers that the number of his unanswered questions is now 35, not 28.)

It was a startling and toughly worded demonstration of the public editor of the nation’s most important newspaper calling his bosses to task and finding them wanting. (Calame called Keller’s terse explanation of the delay and then the decision to print “woefully inadequate.”)

Predictably, the blogosphere was all over it, and opinions ranged from the proposition that Calame was too hard on Keller to the opposite suggestion that Calame was too soft on Keller.

Michelle Malkin wavers between her usual brand of right-wing snarkery — referring to the original article as the “infamous Chicken Little opus” — and actually posing a good question. “Hey, speaking of transparency,” she wrote, “why doesn’t Mr. Calame publish his 35 questions so the rest of us can see what his bosses refuse to answer?”

But just as we began to hope that there might be some common ground between us and Malkin, she goes and gets mad at the Times...

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