Tina Brown coins a new term for the age in her Washington Post column today: “fake transparency.”

She’s talking, of course, about the Times’ long Judith Miller story, and the fact that that story seemed to raise more questions than it answers. That’s a cliche, but in this case, it’s really true. You can’t trust the accounts of any of the players in the piece; everyone comes across as dodgy and not trustworthy. And as Brown points out: How exactly did Miller keep “kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm”? Why was Miller apparently driving the Times’ legal conduct of the episode?

“‘Transparency,'” Brown writes, “turns into a combination of partial truths and morose institutional venting that makes everyone, including the readers, feel worse about themselves and the newspaper than they did before.”

I agree with the first half of that sentence and part of the second. I do feel worse about the Times than I did before. Its half-assed reportage (no fault of the reporters, in this case) of its own half-assed mistakes lays bare the emperor’s lack of clothing.

But I feel pretty good about myself and all the other bloggers and journalism-watchers out there; we’ve all held the Times’ feet to the fire on this one. I can’t wait to see its subsequent articles clarifying this first one. It’s a grand mystery, and watching it unfold is a combination of good fun and high stakes.

I have only one caveat: We do need to remember who the ultimate bad guys are, the people who conducted a smear campaign against a CIA operative and her husband in order to spook the country into war….