[Cold Heat]

In a five-page lawsuit filed in Baltimore's 1st District Court, the Sun and two of its writers, David Nitkin and Michael Olesker, have charged Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich with enacting a policy which was intended to have and has had an impermissible chilling effect on the Sun's right to free expression.

It just keeps coming.

Looks like the media is in full attack mode with a target rich environment.

Everything and anything that dissed them. Namely everyone we know.

[kcvl]

Columnist Michael Olesker says never in three decades as a newspaperman has he made up a quote, but that's exactly what the governor is accusing him of.

The governor says Olesker fabricated an entire conversation with the lieutenant governor. "Why would I make up a quote? If I made up a quote, I wouldn't last 29 minutes, let alone 29 years. I'm a fair and honest reporter," Olesker said.

The far from shy governor has ordered his staff not to talk to or return phone calls from Olesker or from the Sun's State House Bureau chief.

"It's not anything other than with respect to two reporters from the Sun. They now need to direct their questions to our press office. Because we don't trust them to report news, or report quotes accurately, which is what they do for a living," Ehrlich said.

Governor Ehrlich's battles with the Sun actually go back before his election. In endorsing Ehrlich's Democratic opponent, the paper's editorial page suggested Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele brought little to the team other than the color of his skin.

"Clearly what they've done and said about Michael is part of this. It's so far out of bounds, so racial, so inappropriate, that we've asked for a retraction and apology for two years," Ehrlich once said.

The Sun's editor fiercely defends both Olesker and the state house bureau chief. And he says the news department operates completely independently of its editorial pages.