Reactions last week to the inadvertent confession of the Greenwich assistant principal who admitted hiring only young and liberal teachers and excluding Catholics, the better to propagandize students and induce them to grow up voting Democratic, have been just as revealing as the confession itself.

State Attorney General William Tong seemed more upset about what he called the "vigilante journalism" of Project Veritas, which surreptitiously recorded the assistant principal's incriminating comments, than he was about the illegal discrimination itself.

“Journalism should be left to journalists," Tong said. "I think there's something really wrong with vigilante journalism, and I don't think it should be celebrated. There are no rules when somebody engages in Wild West vigilante journalism and tries to entrap somebody.”

But while Project Veritas may have used false pretenses to induce the assistant principal to speak, it didn't "entrap" him. No crime was committed or plotted. Further, journalism is a constitutional right belonging to everyone. Anyone can be a journalist at any time, no training or credential required.

If, as Tong seems to wish, the Greenwich story had been left to respectable news organizations, it almost certainly never would have been obtained, which might have been OK with the attorney general, since public education is an adjunct of his party, the Democrats.

Nevertheless, Tong said his office, which recently was given civil rights enforcement authority, "will conduct a thorough investigation and review and analyze all the evidence." But he added: "This will not happen overnight," which may have been assurance to everyone tainted by the Greenwich scandal that the attorney general's report will not be issued until after the state election in November.

The reaction from Connecticut's biggest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association, was even more resentful than Tong's.

According to National Review, CEA President Kate Dias sent an email to union leaders instructing them not to speak to journalists who "have not been vetted" and indeed not to comment on the Greenwich scandal at all.

Dias' message, National Review said, also told union leaders to warn their colleagues that undercover journalists are "lurking." She wrote: "Keep meetings closed and ensure your members are the only people present. Remind your members that they could be the next victim of a hit piece if they aren't fully aware of whom they make comments to and what they say."

In directing union members to deal only with "vetted" journalists, Dias sounded like Tong in wanting to confine the news to organizations that can be trusted not to embarrass anyone in authority. This is hardly to the credit of those organizations, since it signifies that they are much appreciated for long having minimized or ignored the political skewing of public education.

Adhering to its self-serving conception of "public" education, the CEA refused to respond to an inquiry seeking to confirm the authenticity of the statement National Review attributed to Dias.

Tong and Dias, political liberals, demonstrated that state and local government generally and public education particularly have much to hide. But not so long ago it was liberalism that celebrated and relied on "vigilante journalism" and conservatism that deplored it and even condemned it as unpatriotic.

Most respectable institutions of journalism supported the Vietnam War for many years and recited the U.S. government's misleading or false communiques without critical examination, just as they overlooked the government's spying on war protesters and civil rights advocates who were breaking no laws. Exposing the government's lies about the war required the vigilante journalism of Daniel Ellsberg, the Defense Department consultant who stole and leaked the Pentagon Papers.

The essence of most journalism in that era was captured perfectly by the great liberal political cartoonist Jules Feiffer. One of his cartoon panels concluded: "If you want lies, you go to a government press conference. If you want truth, you steal it."

Or, as the Project Veritas corollary goes, if you want truth, you also can trick those who conceal it into revealing it innocently, leaving them and their co-conspirators sputtering impotently when they are exposed.