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Editor & Publisher grand poobah Greg Mitchell previews Michael Wolff's column on Plamegate in the forthcomingnew Vanity Fair — that's the Jennifer Aniston issue, and, no, by the time it hits newsstands there won't be anything in it you haven't already read about —, and he discovers Wolff in full-on conspiracy-theorist mode. [Update: OK, it's been out for a while, and we should leave the house more often.]

[Wolff] rips those in the news media — principally Time magazine and The New York Times — who knew that Karl Rove was one of the leakers but refused to expose what would have been "one of the biggest stories of the Bush years." Not only that, "they helped cover it up." You might say, he adds, they "became part of a conspiracy."

If they had burned this unworthy source and exposed his "crime," he adds, it would have been "of such consequences that it might, reasonably, have presaged the defeat of the president, might have even — to be slightly melodramatic — altered the course of the war in Iraq." In doing so they showed they owed their greatest allegiance to the source, not their readers.

To recap: By protecting a source who didn't deserve protection, Wolff says, Time and The New York Times — and, we gather, Judy Miller and Matt Cooper and Bill Keller and Jim Kelly and Arthur Sulzberger and Norm Pearlstine — abetted a criminal, engaged in conspiracy, cost John Kerry the election, and made things worse in Iraq.

Boy will things at Michael's be awkward for a bit. Especially if Wolff were to run into one of those guys.

'Vanity Fair' Rips Media 'Conspiracy' in Covering Up Role in Plame Scandal [E&P]