Thomas Peele, a Contra Costa Times investigative reporter and winner of numerous awards, writes in a column printed today: “It is time for all journalists and the people who value them to take the U.S. government’s imprisonment of Josh Wolf much more seriously and call it what it is: a blatant assault on the First Amendment.” Peele notes that some journalists think less of Wolf because he’s a blogger and freelance video photographer: “Journalists have always been mavericks and independents, the best among us raking muck and raising hell.”

• ALSO ON THE OP-ED PAGES SUNDAY was a piece in the Chron by William Bennett Turner, a San Francisco lawyer who teaches a course on the First Amendment and the press at UC Berkeley. He says he used to tell his students on the first day of class that America had the freeest speech and press in the world. Now, he says, he can’t do that anymore — he says press freedom has been slipping away since 9/11.