Judith Miller’s sources
First, Judith Miller relies on Ahmed Chalabi — paid operative for Iraqi exiles — for a series of exclusives about those nasty WMDs pointed at us by Sadam Hussein, providing crucial support for Bush in his run-up to the war. Then she plays the “I have no recollection at this time” card when asked how Valerie Plame’s name (well, “Valerie Flame” as she noted it) first made it into her notebooks.
The Times had to apologize for it getting the build up to the war wrong. A little worse than switching the captions under the names of newly-weds. Now Miller can’t recall who first told her about Valerie Plame? How much more credibility is this Pulitzer Prize winner going to cost to the Times?
As always, Jay Rosen is the first person to read on this story. His take is that Miller essentially hijacked the newspaper. And it has cost us the truth: She didn’t pursue the Wilson/Plame story in the summer of 2003 when it might have had some effect on support for the war and on the election; she has only in the past couple of days agreed even to “cooperate” with the NY Times’ reporting of her own case. As Jay says, “The news pages of the New York Times were edited for months under the principle: don’t report anything that would anger the prosecutor or affect Miller’s case.”
It’s one thing to be gamed by a punk like Jayson Blair who lied so outrageously that you’d have to be as nuts as him to think he was making it all up. It’s another to be gamed by a senior Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. That requires a systemic flaw. If the Times’ editorial process is so broken and unreliable, what else are they getting wrong? And, beyond firing Miller, what can they do to get right?
The truth is that my trust has shifted. I find I trust The Times and other mainstream media far more after they’ve gone through the blogosphere. E.g., I trust Jay’s blogging of the the Times’ coverage — and the remarkable voices in his comments section — more than I trust the coverage itself.
[Tags: media JudithMiller JayRosen nytimes journalism]
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Alright, hang Judith Miller. But then what? When she’s gone, there will still be plenty of other shoddy reporting going on. Let’s look out for that and be remember that in a roiling newspaper industry the best reporting is still coming from ink-on-paper sources.