it was the unamerican acts of a few, not part of the nyt culture? a popular cop-out these days. wtf if it works.


- bill 5-26-2004 9:32 pm [add a comment]

It's so weird. They don't mention Judith Miller--the main reporter perp--in the mea culpa essay, but they run an AP news story about the mea culpa that does mention Miller. Unlike Jayson Blair, she appears to be keeping her job. She should be on a dunking stool.

- tom moody 5-26-2004 9:36 pm [add a comment]

i was wondering where it was in the print version. it sure wasnt prominently displayed on the website when i looked earlier. that she hasnt been canned is deplorable.
- dave 5-26-2004 11:07 pm [add a comment]

This is one of those Bush-inspired moves of saying "I accept responsibility. Absolutely.


























"Oh. Were You waiting for me to do something?"

- tom moody 5-27-2004 2:55 am [add a comment]

todays News Hour : "Not Fit For Print - The New York Times today published a critique of its own reporting on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, and the editorial board admitted its coverage was flawed and relied too heavily on suspect intelligence sources. Ray Suarez discusses the Times' self-assessment with Susan Moeller, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, and Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism." - updated to include link to transcript 6/1/04
- bill 5-27-2004 2:59 am [add a comment]

miller time

"But none of Miller's wild WMD stories has panned out. From these embarrassing results, we can deduce that either 1) Miller's sources were right about WMD, and it's just a matter of time before the United States finds evidence to back them up; 2) Miller's sources were wrong about WMD, and the United States will never find the evidence; 3) Miller's sources played her to help stoke a bogus war; or 4) Miller deliberately weighted the evidence she collected to benefit the hawks. It could be that the United States inadvertently overestimated Iraq's WMD program. For example, the United States might have intercepted communications to Saddam in which his henchmen exaggerated the scale of Iraq's WMD progress to make him happy."

also none of the letters to the nyt editor posted online today, mention miller by name.

i guess this has been simmering a while.
- bill 5-27-2004 4:31 pm [add a comment]

Bloggers have long been on Miller "like a duck on a June bug," as my grandfather used to say. Also students: "Chasing Judith Miller Off the Stage" is a pretty gratifying read.

- tom moody 5-27-2004 7:22 pm [add a comment]

un-unpatriotic press



- bill 5-28-2004 3:15 pm [add a comment]

I felt like Krugman was off base with this one. The Times has run several stories that Wall Street is donating bushels of money to the GOP for the current Administration's re-election. (This doesn't appear to be the usual give-to-both-sides-and-hedge-your-bets-deal.) They're very happy with all the tax cuts, lax regulation, and other "pro-business" policies under Bush. Krugman talks about patriotism and press intimidation but the fact is, the elite wants four more years of Bush.

- tom moody 5-28-2004 6:26 pm [add a comment]

• I was thinking the same thing as I read the Krugman piece. Journalism is big business.
  - steve 5-28-2004 7:23 pm [add a comment]

The Times won't can Miller because it is "working" (as in "work it, girl") the same management style as the Bush administration.

Blair and Raines were different--they had to be purged in an effort to get beyond the outright fabrication scandals, and the soot that they left on the paper's bright public facade.

With Miller, (as everyone has said, I'm just spewing forth for my own satisfaction), it's being presented as a case of "sloppy" reporting in the service of the paper's pre-existing biases, the depths of which will not be plumbed, at least not this year.

- bunny 5-28-2004 8:32 pm [add a comment]

per Tom Rosenstiel from the newshour interview : "Judy Miller was a favorite of the editor of the paper at the time, Howell Raines. So one of the subtexts of this note today was that here was yet another person from the Raines era who was favored who was running stories that were controversial and even were being criticized internally inside the paper and those criticisms were falling on deaf ears." updated 6/1/04
- bill 5-28-2004 9:29 pm [add a comment]

From NYPost's Keith J. Kelly media column:

Times insiders think The New York Times' mea culpa on its weapons of mass destruction reporting may yet have ramifications for reporters, editors and executives.

Judith Miller, the reporter who penned at least four of the stories singled out, is in the crosshairs.

While The Times cited a number of her major "scoops" as questionable or unsupported, it conspicuously left her name off its 1,100-word editor's note, which ran on Wednesday under the headline, "The Times and Iraq."

The buzz inside the paper, said one source, is that "someone is protecting her."

The question is: Who? Could it be Jill Abramson, the co-managing editor? The former head of the Washington bureau, from which Miller was based, Abramson was elevated to her current job when Gerald Boyd was forced out with executive editor Howell Raines in following the Jayson Blair scandal.

Abramson "edited all of those [questionable] stories, or at least a big chunk of them," said the insider. "That could be the next shoe to drop."

But Miller may have protection in the form of Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr., the Times' publisher.

"Arthur likes her," grumbled another reporter. "They double-dated when he was in the Washington bureau."

"The Trust" — a 1999 book on the company by Susan E. Tift and Alex S. Jones — revealed that Miller was part of a Washington "brat pack" of young and mostly single Times reporters, including Sulzberger and his lifelong friend Steve Rattner, now a media investment banker. At the time, Rattner was romantically involved with Miller.

Asked yesterday if he was protecting one of his old brat-pack pals in the latest controversy, Sulzberger said, "I'm not going to talk about it. If that's what they say, that's what they say."

Miller did not return a call seeking comment.

A Times spokeswoman insisted there is no other shoe to drop. "I think the note takes pains not to suggest disciplinary action," she said. "The failures were not by any one individual but by reporters and editors at many levels."

destruction, distraction

"The editors' note to readers will have served its apparent function only if it launches a new round of examination and investigation. I don't mean further acts of contrition or garment-rending, but a series of aggressively reported stories detailing the misinformation, disinformation and suspect analysis that led virtually the entire world to believe Hussein had W.M.D. at his disposal."


- bill 5-30-2004 6:00 pm [add a comment]

michael massing from ny review of books Volume 51, Number 3 · February 26, 2004


via brian's [lehrer] blog
- bill 5-31-2004 7:42 pm [add a comment]

ny magazine miller's crossing

via dratfink
- bill 6-01-2004 8:28 pm [add a comment]

• this reading suggests that (raines in particular) going with millers spin reflected the papers desire to get scoops that will sell papers, not a pro-bush ideology at the top. are we buyinng that ?
  
  then theres this : "So why did it take so long to run an editor’s note? In the newsroom, there are several theories. The first, and least persuasive, is the Sulzberger factor. “There was always the sense, true or not, that she had a benefactor at the top,” says Seth Faison. When Miller joined the Times in the late seventies, she arrived in the Washington bureau at about the same time as Arthur Sulzberger Jr.—a recent college graduate getting hands-on experience in the shop floor of the family business. The D.C. office had only about half a dozen reporters under the age of 35, including Sulzberger, Miller, Steve Rattner, and Phil Taubman. They clung to one another. After work, they would retire to Duke Zeibert’s for a drink. The crowd became even more sociable. When Miller dated Rattner, they shared a weekend house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with Sulzberger and his wife, Gail. There’s no evidence that Sulzberger ever directly intervened to help Miller, and Miller has undergone enough career reversals to make this hard to believe. Still, that friendship has become well known within the newsroom. Fairly or unfairly, there’s a sense that Miller has protection at the absolute top—and that fear reportedly deters some editors from challenging her."
  - bill 6-01-2004 9:57 pm [add a comment]




• Steve Gilliard critiques the critique.

  It's the big thing now for papers to say they were "fooled" by Chalabi, et al. I just don't buy this. Everyone knew that pinhead Bush had decided to go to war and the intelligence was cooked--the papers just weren't anticipating that the Bushies would stop cooking it once we were in Iraq. In other words, no bogus WMDs or fake al Qaeda documents materialized, so the media was stuck admitting they'd falsely sold the war.
  
  - tom moody 6-01-2004 10:16 pm [add a comment]

The Brian Lehrer Show 93.9 Everyone's a Critic, Thursday, June 03, 2004 - "After the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times, an independent public editor was appointed to address questions of ethics and standards in reporting. Public editor Daniel Okrent has recently criticized coverage of the Tony Award nominees and pre-war reporting on Iraq's weapons programs."
- bill 6-03-2004 7:06 pm [add a comment]

NYT's Apologies Miss the Point via common dreams


- bill 6-03-2004 7:10 pm [add a comment]

"IF JUDITH MILLER, the New York Times, and the mainstream media in general had done a better job of covering the run-up to the war in Iraq — if they had given greater voice to the skeptics, if they had made it clear that the case for WMD wasnot a "slam-dunk," to borrow one of CIA director George Tenet’s favorite expressions — perhaps a few more moderates in Congress would have voted against authorizing President Bush to go war. Perhaps public-opinion polls would have been more mixed. Perhaps a few fence-straddling commentators would have gotten off the fence."
- bill 6-03-2004 11:34 pm [add a comment]

From fair.org:

Amazingly, the Times continues to allow the discredited Miller to write about her favorite source, Ahmad Chalabi-- and she appears to still be carrying his water. The story refers to a list of supposed recipients of Iraqi kickbacks that was published by an Iraqi newspaper. Miller and co-author Hoge report that Chalabi's spokesperson says he was not pleased that this list was published:

He said Mr. Chalabi had not been happy when an Arab newspaper listed Mr. Sevan's name along with others for alleged special oil allotments under the program. ''The publishing of such names complicated the inquiry,'' Mr. Qanbar said.

What Miller and Hoge don't mention is that Chalabi has been widely reported as the source of that report (e.g., AP, 5/27/04). A recent Newsweek story (5/31/04) indicated that the whole story might be his work:

Chalabi has been running his own investigation into the United Nations' old Oil-for-Food program. By identifying Iraqi businessmen and political figures who were siphoning off money from the humanitarian program-- not to mention certain European and U.N. officials who may have had their hands in the till-- Chalabi could resort to playing a blackmail game.

What's more, when the story originally broke, this same Chalabi spokesperson seemed delighted (AP, 3/23/04

The newspaper had a list of about 270 former government officials, activists and journalists from more than 46 countries suspected of profiting from Iraqi oil sales. "Thousands of government and nongovernment officials and politicians were bribed, all under the nose of the United Nations," said Entifadh Qanbar, spokesman for council member Ahmad Chalabi. "The United Nations allowed this to happen without interference. Some high-ranking U.N. officials were also involved."

Leaving out important information in order to better present the message of favored sources--that's exactly what Miller got in trouble for. And the Times is still letting her get away with it.