One day the Federal Bureau of Investigation grew frustrated in its efforts to obtain evidence of corruption on the part of a police superintendent at Bridgeport, Connecticut. So it got someone to pretend to try to bribe him. But the “crafty old police superintendent,” as the Wall Street Journal described Joseph A. Walsh in an editorial, got suspicious the moment the fake briber asked for a meeting. And when the attempting briber passed the superintendent $5,000, the Bridgeport police swooped in and arrested the FBI plant on the spot, pulling down his trousers and extracting the wire from the front of his pants as the FBI pleaded vainly for the evidence. It was captured in a famous photograph.

That was back in 1981, in the wake of the Abscam bribery scandal, in which the FBI set up a phony company and sent a phony Arab sheik out to try to bribe public officials. It captured the Abscam bribes on videotape, and eventually won convictions of five congressmen and a senator. The FBI’s tactics horrified many Americans, including the Wall Street Journal, which called the tactics in Abscam and in the Bridgeport case “genuinely offensive to the American sense of justice” and said that “millions of Americans” would be “secretly cheering the local police who caught the FBI in the act.” Such stings are still used by American law enforcement officers.

And, we are reminded in the scandal at National Public Radio, by some journalists, most notably James O’Keefe, who sent two colleagues posing as wealthy potential donors connected to the Muslim Brotherhood and got the NPR representative to say things that got him fired and that led to the resignation of NPR’S president, Vivian Schiller. Now some of the best journalists in the land are debating the tactics used by Mr. O’Keefe. It happens that such tactics are forbidden to reporters of the New York Sun, but we would argue for letting each press proprietor — including Mr. O’Keefe — decide the matter for his or her own institution.

After all, it is constitutionally impermissible to regulate the press. But it is not constitutionally impermissible to regulate our law enforcement officials. And all the press can really do is hold the behavior it uncovers up to public view. It can’t compel NPR to stand in the dock, and it can’t put people in jail. Government use of entrapment schemes is a much more serious matter, as the targets of Abscam learned (the police superintendent in Bridgeport survived the attempt at entrapping him and retired some years later after a 47 year career). It strikes us that for those who are truly horrified at entrapment tactics the place to start is with the abuses by the government.