Home » blogs » Prometheus 6's blog

Who damaged the process more: Jayson Blair or Judith Miller?

Submitted by Prometheus 6 on October 22, 2005 - 10:27am.
on Media | On bullshit | Politics

Totally appropriate quote:

Unfortunately, she has also become the poster child in the push for a national reporter's shield law, and this week she went before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify for the Free Flow of Information Act. There, she didn't even blush when she told the lawmakers: "Confidential sources are the life's blood of journalism. Without them ... people like me would be out of business."

Probably so, but there's still a case to be made for this legislation. 

How Miller was used by source
Tim Rutten
Regarding Media
October 22, 2005

In an extraordinary memo on the Judith Miller affair sent to the New York Times staff late Friday afternoon, the paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, did something far more important than admit errors and explain why they occurred.

He took the focus of this lacerating incident off the Times' internal workings as a media institution and put it squarely where it belongs: on Miller, the individual journalist.

Miller is the Times reporter who spent more than two months in jail for refusing to reveal the identity of a confidential source to a federal grand jury investigating whether presidential political advisor Karl Rove, vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and others may have broken the law by revealing the identity of Valerie Plame, a covert agent of the CIA. Her cover may have been blown to punish her husband, former U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, who wrote an opinion article charging that President Bush had distorted intelligence reports on Saddam Hussein's purported attempts to purchase African uranium that could be used to make nuclear weapons.

As we now know, Libby was Miller's source. Keller's memo said, "If I had known the details of Judy's entanglement with Libby, I'd have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises." He also noted that Miller had misled her editors about whether she'd been "on the receiving end of the [administration's] anti-Wilson whispering campaign."

 

latest article | previous | next

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
Submitted by ptcruiser on October 22, 2005 - 12:41pm.

I thought the pieces written by Miller and published by the Times during the run-up to our invasion of Iraq should have made a responsible person at the Times, including its publisher, suspicious in the extreme. It was clear to me and hundreds, if not thousands, of other Times' readers that Miller was carrying water for the Bush Administration and was not writing like a journalist dedicated to providing readers with the full story of what was going on.

I am generally suspicious of whatever the Times writes about events in the Middle East (and my feelings would not be lessened in this regard if the paper's owners were old line Boston WASPs) but its coverage of the Bush Administration's actions leading up to the invasion was simply disgraceful and Judith Miller played a large and prominent role in this debacle. Tens of thousands of Iraqis killed and maimed and nearly 2,000 Americans killed for this vanity war that Miller obviously supported.

link
Submitted by Natalie Davis on October 25, 2005 - 7:09pm.

Judy Miller's sins are exponentially worse than Jayson Blair's, and his were egregious. As a journalist, I wish we could see her behind bars again, and for a lot longer than 85 days.

link