It’s usually wise to read an “experts say” story a little more skeptically than you normally would.

That’s the case with a Wall Street Journal story earlier this week on the Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit against five major book publishers and Apple, who were trying to break Amazon’s 90 percent monopoly on the ebook retail market. The headline says “Critics of E-Books Lawsuit Miss the Mark, Experts Say.”

Critics have accused the department’s Antitrust Division of picking on struggling book publishers while aiding Internet retailing giant Amazon.com Inc…

So did the Antitrust Division get the law backward? Antitrust scholars say no and that some of the criticism is based on basic misperceptions of the law.

If you can get two antitrust scholars to say something, then it becomes “antitrust scholars say,” implying that they all think that. Are you sure about that, WSJ? Here’s CNET eleven days earlier:

The Department of Justice “has a far better case against the publishers than Apple,” says Dominick Armentano, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Hartford and author of Antitrust and Monopoly who’s now affiliated with the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. “If the CEOs of the various publishers got together in hotel rooms to discuss prices, they are sunk” and might as well settle, he says.

Richard Epstein, the prolific legal scholar and professor of law at New York University, goes further. Epstein argues in an essay published yesterday that there are “difficulties” with the Justice Department’s case against publishers as well: “It will take some time to hear the whole story, but the betting here is that this lawsuit is a mistake.”

And here’s The Seattle Times three weeks ago:

That those companies are under investigation for price fixing doesn’t diminish claims of an Amazon monopoly, said antitrust expert Michael Carrier, of the Rutgers School of Law in Camden, N.J.

The beef with the DOJ’s suit is not necessarily that Apple and the book publishers didn’t violate the law—or at least skirt awfully close to it—by agreeing on a new model with specific price points. It’s that the DOJ suit misses the forest for the trees. As does the Journal:

U.S. antitrust law doesn’t seek to protect little companies against big ones, or even struggling ones against successful ones. Companies can grow as large as they want, as long as they do it through lower prices, better service or niftier innovations. Companies can even become monopolies, as long as they don’t get there illegally or try to extend their power by unlawfully stifling competition.

Well, yes. The whole point of the pro-publisher view is that Amazon was abusing its monopoly position to stifle competition. It sold the publishers’ ebooks at a loss, making it difficult or impossible for competitors to enter the market and perpetuating its 90 percent market share. Somewhat ironically, Amazon only started making money on ebooks after the publishers forced it to adopt the new model (which gave it the exact same terms as Apple, by the way), which has reduced its market share by a third.

Note how how the Journal deals with Amazon’s predatory pricing:

Amazon popularized e-books by introducing the Kindle in 2007 and then heavily discounting the e-books at its own expense. Publishers hated Amazon’s $9.99 price for new best sellers because it made it harder for publishers to sell hardcover books at higher prices.

But as disruptive as Amazon’s pricing may be to publishers, it isn’t illegal, experts say.

The paper implies that Amazon lowered its profit margins, but it doesn’t tell readers that Amazon lost money on the books. That might make folks who haven’t been closely following the story ask why they’d do such a thing.

Glossing over the predatory pricing angle allows it to say something as obviously nonsensical as this:

But the law is concerned with protecting competition, not competitors, experts say.

How do you go about protecting competition without protecting competitors—even if only indirectly?