I never met Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey. Until he was murdered last week on the streets of Oakland, Calif., I had never heard of him or his newspaper.

Chauncey Bailey, 57, was just another newspaper editor dedicated to covering the community he loves -- in this case, a hardscrabble African-American city in the San Francisco Bay area.

Chauncey Bailey was executed last week in broad daylight. A 19-year-old confessed to the murder a few days later when the cops caught him.

Devaughndre Broussard, the confessed killer, doesn't know a whole lot about what it means to tolerate the views of others. As a handyman and part-time cook at Your Black Muslim Bakery, the subtleties of freedom of the press eluded him. All Mr. Broussard knew was that Chauncey Bailey wrote about Your Black Muslim Bakery with no regard for its unique place in Oakland.

Founded in 1968 by the late Yusuf Bey, Your Black Muslim Bakery was initially an oasis of black self-reliance in a troubled year of assassinations, riots and social turmoil in Northern California.

Mr. Broussard resented Mr. Bailey for writing about Yusuf Bey as if he were just an ordinary mortal with a rap sheet.

Because Mr. Bailey was obliged to chronicle the group's ongoing troubles with the law, the most salacious allegations against the bakery's founder stretching back to the late 1960s were constantly recycled along with recent charges of kidnapping, sexual assault, gun violence, murder and intimidation.

Like all skeptical media infidels, Mr. Bailey rarely wrote about the bakery's delicious fish sandwiches, sweet buns or bean pies.

For always accentuating the negative, Devaughndre Broussard decided, Chauncey Bailey had to die.

According to his confession to police, Mr. Broussard drove to the Oakland Post. When he didn't find his victim at the office, he drove around the neighborhood until he spotted him at 14th and Alice streets.

Wearing a ski mask, Mr. Broussard verbally confronted Mr. Bailey before shooting him several times with a shotgun at close range. Even by the standards of murders committed during broad daylight in Oakland, it was brazen. Witnesses scattered.

Devaughndre Broussard was taken into custody several days later during an early-morning raid of the bakery. The shotgun was found on the premises. Later, he told interrogators that he was simply being "a good soldier" when he blew Mr. Bailey away. He thought the stories Mr. Bailey had written about the bakery were unfair and feared more would be on the way unless he exercised editorial oversight of his own.

Chauncey Bailey had been working on a story about the financial solvency of Your Black Muslim Bakery, which recently filed for bankruptcy but had once been the recipient of generous government grants.

Your Black Muslim Bakery appears to have started out legitimately, but morphed into a criminal enterprise that has depended on the silence and acquiescence of Oakland's black community for years.

Despite its name, Your Black Muslim Bakery isn't affiliated with Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam or any known Islamic group in the United States.

Even Yusuf Bey's family distanced itself from the bakery after he died in 2003, though Yusuf Bey IV was arrested for gun violations in the same early-morning raid that netted the murder suspect.

Meanwhile, Chauncey Bailey's funeral is tomorrow. He has the dubious distinction of being the first journalist executed on America soil since the mob murdered Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles in 1976.

Chauncey Bailey's murder should have made the front page of every newspaper in America the day after it happened. Why it didn't is puzzling and, frankly, disgraceful. This isn't a case of "black-on-black" crime, though there is an element of that present. Chauncey Bailey's murder is primarily an assault on the First Amendment. Mr. Broussard would have shot him just as dead had he been white or Asian-American.

Working in newspapers isn't the best-paying profession in the world. It would be nice if the one inviolable perk of the job was this: If even the lowliest ink-stained wretch is murdered on the job, every newspaper in the country has to prominently note the fact that the First Amendment has one less champion. Is that too much to ask?

I never met Chauncey Bailey. Until he was murdered last week, I'd never heard of him or his newspaper. Today, I hope we're all just a little more conscious of the void created by his passing. It isn't every day that a reporter is murdered in America for trying to tell the truth. This is a big deal.