From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Bob Garfield. This week inC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

This week in Princeton, New Jersey, FBI agents reportedly circulated a photograph of a suspect in its anthrax investigation that looks, according to a CNN source, an awful lot like Dr. Stephen Hatfield.

And this week in Washington, lawyers for Stephen Hatfield lodged formal complaints with

the Justice Department and the FBI.

Hatfield, an expert in bio-warfare, is one of many so-called persons of interest in the case,

but the only one repeatedly named in the press.

He says he is innocent and that the FBI's

leaks to the media have made a wasteland of his life. We've seen this sort of thing before,

a presumption of guilt before the facts are in, what appears to be the sweating of suspects

by law enforcement through anonymous leaks in the press. There are the notorious examples of presumed Atlanta bomber Richard Jewell and presumed spy

Wenho Lee.

Now there's presumed anthrax attacker Stephen Hatfield.

Nick Christoff is a columnist for the New York Times.

You know, if you look back at how the media has handled various cases, then we really have, at times, ruined the lives of people by tossing their names out there before they've been subject to any kind of criminal process and when our presumption has to be that they're innocent and just caught in this incredible nightmare.

Yet over the past few months, Christoph has assiduously compiled

and reported an impressive but entirely circumstantial case against the man he called Mr. Z.

His unique access to the precise kind of anthrax used in the attacks that killed five people,

his poor showing on three polygraph tests. He reported Z's own claim to have

taken part in the actions of the White Army in Rhodesia, where there is evidence that in the late

70s, anthrax was released and sickened 10,000 blacks. But Christoph never used Stephen Hatfield's

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