Miller Light

The talk of the journalism world this morning is yesterday's long-awaited New York Times story concerning Times reporter Judy Miller. (Miller also authored a first person companion piece.)

The piece provides new details about the investigation, and reveals tension and divisions inside the newsroom. Miller, who recently left jail after initially refusing to cooperate with the special prosecutor investigating the leak of a former CIA operative's name, is characterized in her own paper as "an intrepid reporter whom editors found hard to control." Some of Miller's colleagues, the Times reported, refused to work with her. Miller herself said she didn't recall who leaked the name in question, Valerie Plame, which she recorded as "Valerie Flame" in her notebook. That claim did not sit well with many media critics.

"When the Plame case broke open in July 2003, these notes were presumably no more than a few weeks old," wrote Arianna Huffington. "But who had revealed Plame's name was not seared on Miller's mind?"

"This is as believable as Woodward and Bernstein not recalling who Deep Throat was," she added. "It also means that Judy went to jail to protect a source she can't recall."

There is no shortage of extensive commentaries on the matter. Below you'll find a sampling of reaction from bloggers and journalists.

James Wolcott:

Let us not be too harsh on Judith Miller herself, however. She was caught up in the hypnotic voodoo of highstakes journalism. We've all been there. All of us veteran reporters who risk our parking privileges in pursuit of a hot story know what it's like to have strange words leap into your notebook out of nowhere in the middle of an intense interrogation.

You're sitting there having breakfast at the St. Regis with Scooter Aspen, buttering each other's toast, and somehow the name "Valerie Flame" pops up in your notebook without you knowing how it got there! It's your handwriting, sure enough, but rack your brain much as you will, you just can't remember which little birdie tweeted that name into your ear.

David Kaiser:

Today the New York Times has published an enormous piece on the Judith Miller story, as seen from the paper's vantage point, and a long piece by Miller herself explaining what she did. Together they are the most appalling commentary that I have ever seen about the state of American journalism—all the more so since the Times editors, much less their reporter, don't seem to have any understanding of what they have done to their profession.

Jay Rosen:

Like I said, it became Judy Miller's newspaper. Her decision-making, I said on CNN, was driving the newspaper's. Mr. Sulzberger is the publisher; the Times is a public company. Isn't his hand supposed to be on the wheel for the newspaper as a public trust?

This car had her hand on the wheel...I know what he meant. It was her call on whether to "end" the case by testifying. But it was his call when the Times declared her case a First Amendment struggle and matter of high journalistic principle. Because the particular high principle invoked by Miller—protecting a reporter's sources—in this case tied their hands for later stages of the fight that their own decision-making brought on. They turned over the wheel to Judy Miller; her games of telepathy with Libby became the "logic."

Halley Suitt:

…as for metaphors of who was running the show, the Times publisher suggests Judy Miller was in the driver's seat at the paper, but c'mon guys, can't we call it what it was ... she seemed to have the boys by the balls.

Dan Kennedy:

The lead story is suffused with personal contempt for Miller. Her grotesquely wrong stories claiming that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a veritable hotbed of unconventional weapons and terrorist gangs is fair game, as is the weirdly disturbing manner in which she conducted herself with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Greg Mitchell:

It's not enough that Judith Miller, we learned Saturday, is taking some time off and "hopes" to return to the New York Times newsroom. As the newspaper's devastating account of her Plame games -- and her own first-person sidebar -- make clear, she should be promptly dismissed for crimes against journalism, and her own newspaper. And Bill Keller, executive editor, who let her get away with it, owes readers, at the minimum, an apology instead of merely hailing his paper's long-delayed analysis and saying that readers can make of it what they will.

uniongrrl:

I just want to personally thank my friends who saved me from making a fool of myself by unconditionally supporting Judith Miller when she went to jail "to protect her First Amendment rights." I mean, I almost bought the T-shirt!

Rachel Sklar:

You can't help but feel bad for the New York Times: its leadership impugned, its staffers divided, its morale low, its reporters scooped regularly on its own story.

And meanwhile, Judith Miller, after incurring millions in legal fees, let her colleagues at the Times down in the most fundamental way: she refused to talk to them. "In two interviews," wrote the Times, "Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes." A far cry from the story promised by Bill Keller, the story that they were "yearning" to write now that Miller had been released from her contempt charge.

Tom Rosenstiel:

While the piece hardly clarifies everything, the Times should be praised for its candor.

Mickey Kaus:

It's now clear confinement wasn't pointless. It worked for the prosecutor exactly as intended. After a couple of months of sleeping on "two thin mats on a concrete slab," Miller decided, in her words, "I owed it to myself" to check and see if just maybe Libby really meant to release her from her promise of confidentiality. And sure enough-- you know what?--it turns out he did! The message sent to every prosecutor in the country is "Don't believe journalists who say they will never testify. A bit of hard time and they just might find a reason to change their minds. Judy Miller did." This is the victory for the press the Times has achieved. More journalists will now go to jail, quite possibly, than if Miller had just cut a deal right away, before taking her stand on "principle."

Andrew Sullivan:

It also appears that Miller was at best misleading and at worst lying to her editors when she said no to the question of whether she was one of six reporters leaked to in the case. Wherever her loyalty lies, it is obviously not to the New York Times. Why did her editors not insist on having her turn over the notes? Are they not NYT property? Or is she somehow in a "star-reporter zone" outside of normal editorial control?

David Corn:

Taubman and Jill Abramson, a managing editor, called the situation "Excruciatingly difficult." It was worse. As I've written before, Jayson Blair bamboozled his editors; Judy Miller handcuffed hers. If a deal could have been reached a year earlier, the Times would not be as embarrassed as it is today. No wonder, as the paper reports, when Miller made a post-release speech in the newsroom, claiming a victory for press freedoms, her colleagues "responded with restrained applause."