Walter Pincus stood out in 2003 when he bucked the media conventional wisdom and emerged as one of the most aggressive doubters of the Bush administration’s claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Ten years later, the Washington Post columnist is once again waging another lonely crusade — only this time it’s against the press. His target: what he believes is the Washington press corps’ overheated and sanctimonious response to the Justice Department’s subpoenas of Associated Press reporters’ phone records. To Pincus’s eye, the bleatings of outrage from the press seem to carry the assumption that reporters are protected from the normal workings of the law in a way that no other citizen can expect.

Warren Buffett's newspaper group is purchasing the Roanoke Times from Landmark Media Enterprises of Norfolk, Va., for an undisclosed price. The paper, which will be Buffett's 29th daily newspaper, circulates about 90,000 copies on Sundays and 76,000 the other days of the week and has about 300 employees. The newspaper, which also operates Roanoke.com, was founded in 1889 and has been owned by Landmark since 1969.

The New York Times, AP, CNN and McClatchy are among news organizations that say they won't attend a meeting between the media and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder because the DOJ wants the conversation to be off the record. "If the government wants to justify its pursuit of journalists, they ought to do it in public," McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher told Poynter.