The Miller Accounts I Want To Read
Judith Miller's five-clicker in today's NYTimes is a festival of non-recollection, and I don't believe a word of it.
I was a reporter for just a couple years, but I've followed reportorial procedures in the 30 years since I left the "profession," taking notes from interviews and meetings, some of it covering quite sensitive material that must be dealt with carefully, which I then use to write materials for my clients.
And as bad as my memory is, using my notes, my recollection of conversations from two years ago is far superior to Judith Miller's.
Her recounting of her sworn testimony before a federal grand jury makes her sound like Mafia boss or an Enron exec, and as such, is a massive embarassment to journalism and the NYT. I agree with Editor & Publisher that she should be fired, but for entirely different reasons.
E&P wants her fired for various arcane journalistic protocol reasons, and for trusting Scooter Libby as "a good faith source who is usually straight with me."
I want her fired because she never wrote a word about what this good faith source told her. Comparing Libby's conversations with the detailed chronology laid out by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard, we see that Libby was in fact being straight with Miller, and detailing not just legit criticisms of Wilson, but also additional evidence of Saddam's quest for African uranium.
But she never published a word of it. So the account I want is not of her testimony before the grand jury, but of her discussions with her editors.
NYT lead the charge against Bush, Cheney, Rove and the WMD claims, and now we see that it had access to Miller's notebooks full of rebutting information, but never used this material to bring a measure of fairness to its reporting.
Why didn't they? Because of simple, blind prejudice. The NYT trusts every leftwing congressional staffer that leaks like an old Depends, but it cannot fathom how someone who works for Dick Cheney can be trustworthy.
So fire Miller, and fire her editors, and apologize to the American people for being nothing more than a biased and fallen one-time pillar of the media whose slogan ought to be "All the news we see fit to print."
I was a reporter for just a couple years, but I've followed reportorial procedures in the 30 years since I left the "profession," taking notes from interviews and meetings, some of it covering quite sensitive material that must be dealt with carefully, which I then use to write materials for my clients.
And as bad as my memory is, using my notes, my recollection of conversations from two years ago is far superior to Judith Miller's.
Her recounting of her sworn testimony before a federal grand jury makes her sound like Mafia boss or an Enron exec, and as such, is a massive embarassment to journalism and the NYT. I agree with Editor & Publisher that she should be fired, but for entirely different reasons.
E&P wants her fired for various arcane journalistic protocol reasons, and for trusting Scooter Libby as "a good faith source who is usually straight with me."
I want her fired because she never wrote a word about what this good faith source told her. Comparing Libby's conversations with the detailed chronology laid out by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard, we see that Libby was in fact being straight with Miller, and detailing not just legit criticisms of Wilson, but also additional evidence of Saddam's quest for African uranium.
But she never published a word of it. So the account I want is not of her testimony before the grand jury, but of her discussions with her editors.
NYT lead the charge against Bush, Cheney, Rove and the WMD claims, and now we see that it had access to Miller's notebooks full of rebutting information, but never used this material to bring a measure of fairness to its reporting.
Why didn't they? Because of simple, blind prejudice. The NYT trusts every leftwing congressional staffer that leaks like an old Depends, but it cannot fathom how someone who works for Dick Cheney can be trustworthy.
So fire Miller, and fire her editors, and apologize to the American people for being nothing more than a biased and fallen one-time pillar of the media whose slogan ought to be "All the news we see fit to print."
posted by Laer at 8:23 AM
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