Want to know why people don't trust journalism?

Let's go to a headline in today's Washington Post. "Advertiser Charged in Massive Database Theft." (The illustration is from the good people at ISIPP.Com, and if you like it as much as I do, buy yourself some swag displaying it -- coffee mugs, t-shirts, etc. -- right here.)

It's followed by this priceless lede. "Federal authorities yesterday charged an online advertiser in Florida with tapping into the computer system of a large database marketer in Arkansas and stealing "vast amounts of personal information" about Americans in what they described as one of the largest network intrusions in recent memory."

Wrong! What we have is a spammer, people! (If you want to be real, real careful, write alleged spammer.) I spent five seconds Googling the name of this "company," Snipermail, at Google Groups. Take a look for yourself. Or just check the name on the indictment against news.admin.net-abuse.sightings.

Now what is supposed to be the difference between me and the Post? I guess part of it is the reporters there make more money from their reporting than I do, and the Post has more advertising than I do.

But the practical difference is that the Post has lawyers, lots of lawyers, lawyers who are supposed to defend a reporter when they write something that is correct, but that the subject in the story doesn't like. Hey, I saw All the President's Men.

I am certain Scott Levine hates being called a spammer. (ZDNet, which has never had a movie written about its reporters, called him a "Bulk Emailer" in their headline. Fair enough.) I am certain that, before Levine found himself facing criminal charges, he could have called the Post and threatened holy heck if they called him a spammer. (I assume he has bigger problems at the moment.) But the evidence is there, it's easy to get, it took me 10 seconds, the charge of libel for calling him a spammer is easily defensible, and I guarantee you it took Robert O'Harrow Jr. no more than 10 seconds to learn the same thing.

But O'Harrow couldn't write it. His editors were afraid, and no doubt the lawyers were right behind them. As a result the news was slanted, the issue was muddied, and (most important) the legitimate marketing industry was tainted. (Hey, DMA, how about a suit against the Post?)

Reading the story, which is based entirely on the indictment, what happened was that Levine allegedly used a legitimate customer account, which he'd gotten illegitimately, to tap into the Acxiom computer system in Little Rock and download their lists. Not the reports, which they sell, and not a legitimate check against a legitimate list, a service they also sell. He downloaded the list. (Some reports indicate as much as 8.2 gigabytes was transferred.)

That's called theft. And only two kinds of people are going to engage in that kind of theft. One is someone who thinks he's going to go into business against Axciom by stealing their assets. The other is a spammer. There's a 139-count indictment on the crime. Acxiom wants to make an example of this, and who can blame them?

But they can't make an example if the news media is to be so timid as to identify the guy as a "marketer." A "marketer" might have made an honest mistake. Acxiom might be persecuting a "marketer" when in fact they're prosecuting a spammer. If "marketer" means, as I think it does, a legitimate person engaged in some legitimate business called "marketing," that's what I'd think.

But a spammer hacked into a database and stole its list for spamming purposes? Easy story to get (especially when they're unsealing an indictment) and easy to write.

But in The Washington Post, today, impossible to publish.

So why should we believe anything they publish?