It sounds as if divorce court should get ready to put a new case on its schedule: the New York Times V Judith Miller.
It’s getting ugly out there in the Plamegate case in anything involving Miller and is that a surprise? She was controversial before the scandal broke, went to jail in the Plamegate case (forcing many of America’s journalists who jealously defend the right to protect sources to hold their noses and line up behind her), announced she couldn’t recall whom the KEY SOURCE WAS in outing a CIA official and, by some accounts, was not the epitome of cooperation when her own newspaper sought to write an account of the whole mess.
And now it’s getting worse, according to the Washington Post:
New York Times executives “fully encouraged” reporter Judith Miller in her refusal to testify in the CIA leak investigation, a stance that led to her jailing, and later told Miller she could not continue at the paper unless she wrote a first-person account, her attorney said yesterday.
The comments by Robert Bennett came as Executive Editor Bill Keller accused Miller of apparently misleading the newspaper about her dealings with Vice President Cheney’s top aide, signaling the first public split between Miller and the management of a newspaper that had fully embraced her in the contentious legal battle.
So pick and choose: who is doing CYA? Miller, or the Times — or both? MORE:
Bennett, Miller’s lawyer, said he argued with Times executives that her agreement with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to testify before a grand jury did not entitle her to put “in the newspaper” her off-the-record conversations with Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff.
Disputing a lengthy Times story last Sunday in which Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said that “this car had her hand on the wheel,” Bennett said Sulzberger and Keller “were making it very clear what they thought she should do. . . . She may be controversial in some things, but the bottom line is she spent 85 days in jail, mostly on a principle which the New York Times fully encouraged her to assert.” He added that the executives left the final decision to Miller.
Bennett’s comments, in response to a reporter’s inquiry, followed a memo to the Times staff in which Keller distanced himself from Miller even while acknowledging several mistakes on his part.
The Post has details of that memo, but we point you to Crooks And Liars which gives you the WHOLE TEXT of this Keller memo (verified by three sources, John Amato writes) so you can read it all yourself (click on EXCERPT link in his post). A key part of it:
I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own. It is a natural and proper instinct to defend reporters when the government seeks to interfere in our work. And under other circumstances it might have been fine to entrust the details — the substance of the confidential interviews, the notes — to lawyers who would be handling the case. But in this case I missed what should have been significant alarm bells. Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn’t know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (In November of 2003 Phil Taubman tried to ascertain whether any of our correspondents had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper.
What’s at stake? REPUTATIONS:
- Miller wants to write a book. If she emerges from this with her reputation destroyed, her book will wind up remaindered like that of serial plagiarizer and quote-inventor Jayson Blair. He left the Times in disgrace, had a book highly touted on TV but, despite publicity (from media types such as Katic Couric), it bombed at the bookstores. Miller also wants to be able to emerge from this with some kind of a journalistic future. Right now even Fox News might think twice.
- The Times has been battered by a series of scandals over the past few years and a sense that its best days as “the paper of record” were behind it. The new administration wants to reverse this trend and some of the issues raised by Miller’s involvement raise questions about the quality of its administration in terms of scrutiny of employees — and its judgment calls.
So reputations — and big bucks – are at stake here.
Los Angeles Times media critic Tim Rutten writes about Keller’s memo:
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…..
…..The Times is a great news organization with a new found capacity for self-criticism and a demonstrated capacity to renew itself. Miller, the reporter, represents something far more persistent and pernicious in American journalism. She’s virtually an exemplar of an all-too-common variety of Washington reporter: ambitious, self-interested, unscrupulous and intoxicated by proximity to power.
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.
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:
–Some reporters who cover the police beat begin to think of themselves as members of law enforcement. They love, protect and almost do p.r. for their sources.
–Some reporters who cover film and theater begin to think of themselves as part of show business. They love, protect and almost do p.r. for their sources.
–Some reporters who cover diplomats begin to think of themselves as part of the diplomatic community. They love, protect and almost do p.r. for their sources.
—Some reporters who cover military affairs or intelligence begin to think of themselves as part of the military and intelligence community. They love, protect and almost do p.r. for their sources.
Again, we’re talking about SOME reporters; not all. Most do not fall into this trap.
As the LAT notes, the proximity to power CAN “intoxicate” reporters who can lose sight of the fact that a reporter isn’t supposed to be ANY source’s friend or their enemy.
The bulk of reporters get it. The lingering question is whether Miller does.
And, when her lawyer is out there answering a New York Times editor’s memo, it raises your eyebrows way up to your hairline…
UPDATE: Some thoughts about a possible Miller book.