And, in fact, Fox News has, since 2008, had someone on the payroll who understands the perils for journalists once prosecutors begin hunting for leaks: Judith Miller, the ex-New York Times correspondent who went to prison in 2005 rather than give up her sources during the investigation into the leak of the classified identity of Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq war critic Joe Wilson. She went on air to address the White House leaks matter last summer, and while, not exactly dissenting from the consensus Fox News view that people should go to jail over the Sanger book, she wasn't nearly as zealous in her support of a prosecution.

On that June 15 "special edition" of Hannity about the leaks, which the host called a "state of emergency," Byron York, of The Washington Examiner, argued that the conservative media could get a repeat of the kind of investigation that landed in Miller jail if they just kept talking about the Sanger book leaks. "To have a really big investigation, you have to have a white-hot controversy before it. Think back to the Valerie Plame affair. There was a drumbeat in The New York Times and The Washington Post, on the broadcast networks and on cable, every single day," he said. "And in the end, the Bush administration buckled. They gave Patrick Fitzgerald the investigator, basically, the full powers of the Attorney General to look into this." At the end of the show, Miller mostly concurred, "Look, these are very serious issues and these are serious leaks. And they should be investigated, and they are being investigated." Talking about the case later in August, in a clip that made The Daily Show, she said, "This is the problem. These leaks – especially the kind of leaks that are being investigated now by not one, but two special prosecutors – they are truly injurious to the national security. They jeopardize our security as a nation."

If Fox News was unconcerned about what happened to Miller last summer, they were pretty blasé about her legal troubles back in 2005. On October 16 of that year — after Miller had served 85 days in jail on contempt charges, after her source. Dick Cheney aide Scooter Libby, had released her from her confidentiality pledge, after she testified to a grand jury on what he had told her — Brit Hume, who has the managing editor title at Fox News, said, "It's kind of an intriguing story about her, and how she came to testify, and whether she had a guarantee and all of that. But I don't think the public cares much about that. And as I was reading her story today, it occurred to me that I didn't either."

Fox News also practices what it preaches. Last year, Fox prosecuted its own leaker, former Fox employee Joe Muto, who was rewarded for his brief stint as Gawker's "Fox Mole" with being charged with grand larceny. "The mole shows a culture that believes in theft, a lack of loyalty, turning on his colleagues, lying to management," Fox chief Roger Ailes said. When it comes to intimidating Fox News employees, that's a right Ailes reserves for himself.