The New York Post is reporting on an internal memo from New York Times Editor Bill Keller essentially calling Judith Miller a liar. So The Times itself reports today on the subject:
In a memorandum sent to the staff while he was traveling overseas, Mr. Keller said he wished he had "sat her down for a thorough debriefing" after Ms. Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the investigation into the leaking of the name of a C.I.A. operative.
In his first direct criticism of Ms. Miller, Mr. Keller said she "seems to have misled" the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, Philip Taubman, when she was asked by Mr. Taubman if she was one of at least six Washington journalists who had reportedly been told that Valerie Plame was a C.I.A. operative.
And, he wrote, had he known of her "entanglement" with I. Lewis Libby Jr., chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, he might have been more willing to explore compromises with the prosecutor investigating the case.
Keller says that he did not know that Miller was one of the reporters "on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign." Miller is not amused:
Ms. Miller said in an interview that Mr. Keller's statements were "seriously inaccurate." She also provided The Times with a copy of a memorandum she had sent to Mr. Keller in response.
"I certainly never meant to mislead Phil, nor did I mislead him," she wrote to Mr. Keller, referring to Mr. Taubman.
She wrote that as she had said in an account in The Times last Sunday, she had discussed Mr. Wilson and his wife with government officials, but "I was unaware that there was a deliberate, concerted disinformation campaign to discredit Wilson and that if there had been, I did not think I was a target of it."
She added, "As for your reference to my 'entanglement' with Mr. Libby, I had no personal, social, or other relationship with him except as a source."
It's all about the aspens, Judy.
Keller also lays in a punch at Judy (ha) about her reporting on WMDs:
In his memorandum, Mr. Keller said he regretted waiting a year before confronting problems with Ms. Miller's reporting on unconventional weapons in Iraq. He said he had delayed confronting those problems, because the newspaper had just been through the traumatic Jayson Blair episode, in which a Times reporter was found to have fabricated articles. That led to the departure of Howell Raines, the executive editor, and Gerald Boyd, the managing editor.
"It felt somehow unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors," Mr. Keller wrote. But by waiting more than a year, he acknowledged, "we allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester.
"Worse, we fear, we fostered an impression that The Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers," he wrote.
The Times also runs an AP story, which heightens the sense of Theater of the Absurd:
Miller's attorney, Bob Bennett, told The Washington Post that it was ''absolutely false'' to suggest she withheld information about a June 2003 meeting with Libby, saying the conversation hadn't seemed like ''a big deal at the time.''
Responding to Keller's memo, Bennett said: ''I am very concerned now that there are people trying to even old scores and undercut her as a heroic journalist.''
Bennett did not return calls by The Associated Press seeking comment.
Miller's problem seems to be an inability to tell the truth until forced to:
The criticism of Miller emerged amid new details about how she belatedly turned over notes of a June 23, 2003, conversation she had with Libby.
In her first grand jury appearance Sept. 30 after being freed from prison for refusing to testify, Miller did not mention the meeting.
She retrieved her notes about it only when prosecutors showed her White House visitor logs showing she had met with Libby in the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, said two lawyers, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing secrecy of the grand jury probe.
One lawyer familiar with Miller's testimony said the reporter told prosecutors at first that she did not believe the June meeting would have involved Plame because she had just returned from covering the Iraq war. She said she was probably giving Libby an update of her experiences there, the lawyer said.
However, in reviewing her notes, Miller discovered they indicated that Libby had given her information about Plame at that meeting. Fitzgerald then arranged for her to return to the grand jury to testify about it, the lawyers said.
The evidence of that meeting has become important to the investigation because it indicates that Libby was passing information to reporters about Plame well before her husband went public with accusations that the Bush administration had twisted pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
For extra measure, Keller sends out Maureen Dowd to get into a cat fight with Miller (Times Editorial Rampart), saying that Miller was "sorely in need of a tight editorial leash" (ah Mo Do, you kinky minx, you!) and labeling Miller a "Woman of Mass Destruction."
Check out Joe Gandelman's post on this, especially his response to an LA Times column:
Indeed: as someone who was in daily journalism for some years, I can attest to the fact that shield laws and protection of sources are huge subjects — and concerns — to journalists and to the corporations that employ them...and defend them in court. Many people dump on the media and reporters but don't have actual contact with most reporters — who for the most part are serious, professional news gatherers who agonize over these issues.
Miller, as the LAT notes, seems symptomatic of a truism that you find with SOME reporters. You can see it in several areas...
Joe is describing, I think, a situation in which a reporter "goes native" and come to identify with his or her subjects more that with the job as a journalist. He insists that most reporters do not fall into this trap, and I trust him. But I am not convinced that Keller and his newspaper should be let off the hook. It seems to me that The Times has found itself "misled" so many times it's getting hard to give it any credence outside the Style Section.
The Times offices can't be party town at the moment, and the organization is teetering on a precipice. Will throwing Judith Miller off save itself? Isn't there more work to be done?
UPDATE: Here, for now at least, is a copy of Dowd's column (h/t: medianation, who also links to a Poynter advance of a New York Magazine laying the blame on Arthur Sulzberger). Sooner or later this will probably be expunged, so get it while it's hot. Mo Do starts saying how much she likes Miller, then gets all bitchy about Judy taking her seat at a White House briefing. This is journalism, I guess. She ends with a "One move and the paper gets it" threat, writing, "Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country." If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands." Hmmm.
Comments