Watching Phil Mickelson leap with joy yesterday after winning the Masters golf tournament — a photo is on our front page this morning — we were reminded that for some fans and golfers, the tournament is actually about golf. It’s not, in other words, about the policy of the country club that hosts the tournament, Augusta National, not to admit women.

You wouldn’t have known that from last year’s coverage in the New York Times, which launched a crusade against the country club. In the run-up to the 2003 Masters, the Times ran more than 100 pieces, including an editorial calling on Tiger Woods to boycott the event and a front-page “news” story with the headline “CBS Staying Silent in Debate on Women Joining Augusta.”

This time around, the underlying reality was pretty much the same. There are still no women members at Augusta National, which is still run by William “Hootie” Johnson. Yet this year, the Times seems to think less of the story. It’s been kept mainly on the sport pages, not the editorial column and the front page. And the focus has been, at least for the most part, on the golf, not the politics. It’s a reminder that news is, as it should be, what an editor says it is.

How about the person other than the Times editor who was pressing the issue? Well, Martha Burk of the National Council of Women’s Organizations is now pro claiming that her group “isn’t about golf.” She’s ganged up with the Washington law firm Mehri & Skalet PLLC, whose lawyers were responsible for race discrimination class-action lawsuits that were settled by Coca-Cola (for $192.5 million) and Texaco (for $176 million). The law firm and the women’s group are launching a “Women on Wall Street” initiative, which seems intent on an effort to wring settlements out of deep-pocketed financial-services firms whose executives belong to Augusta National.

The law firm’s Cyrus Mehri wrote to Ms. Burk on April 5,”We understand that you want us to begin by looking at financial sector companies including American Express, Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway, Citigroup, Franklin Templeton, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Prudential.” The letter went on, “Publicly traded companies should disclose the gender and racial breakdown of the 150 highest paid U.S. employees. …Our focus is less on Hootieisms in Augusta than on Hootieisms on Wall Street.”

Look for some editors to take up these issues the same way they did the issue of the country-club membership. But the liberal editors are gnats compared to the trial lawyers, who are killer bees. In other words, the shareholders of some of America’s top corporations may soon long for the day when the focus was Hootieisms in Augusta.