True, but no legal protection makes it far more difficult to discover government or corporate fraud.
I don't trust the press, but I trust the government even less. Bush won't be President forever. Now that we have some actual conservative news outlets, we need a protected conservative press in case Hillary becomes President.
To take it one step further, the best way to limit government fraud is to eliminate the entire concept of a "government employee" as we know it. Every person employed by the government gets fired at the end of the year, and replaced by someone else -- that way, there would be no need for a government worker to have any fear of losing your job by exposing criminal activity on the part of his superiors.