Miller’s Crossing

But Judy Miller has always been a little different in her approach to the job. What she has done with her stint in jail and wrong reporting about WMD has perverted the meaning of confidential source.

I am revisiting the Miller issue because it is important to understand the reason for offering a source confidentiality is to protect a source from retaliation in exchange for information a reporter could not otherwise obtain. The idea of giving a political hack like Scooter Libby cover for launching a political attack on Joe Wilson by outing his wife as a CIA agent is not what protecting sources is about. Judy Miller’s lame and incomplete version of her own grand jury appearances forces the reader to look between the lines. Libby is her long-term source. He has a direct pipeline to his fellow neo-cons who hyped an array of fraudulent sources that convinced the country Saddam was pursuing weapons of mass destruction. Miller was embedded in a special Pentagon unit looking for WMD in Iraq. New York Magazine reported that no less than the Secretary of Defense helped get Miller into into the secret WMD unit. My suspicion is Miller earned her place because Libby successfully used Miller on behalf of the Vice President to sell the lies that bolstered support leading to the war. Miller had been vetted by the neo-cons and trusted based on the fact that she reported their claims about WMD prior to the war. Miller was seen as one of them, not as and investigative reporter who would challenge them.

One of the pals who visited Miller in jail was John Bolton, the staff abusing UN Ambassador, who still believes the WMD is out there somewhere. Miller would not have been permitted to accompany such a unit without friends in the Defense Department and inside the White House. When it turned out her coverage was wrong the Time’s management should have disciplined her. Instead Bill Keller allowed her to be part of a team that would investigate what went wrong with the paper’s coverage. I personally filed a complaint about Miller’s coverage with the then-Times Ombudsman. On January 4, 2004 I received a canned response from the Public Editor’s Office at the Time’s that would later be contradicted by Miller herself in the article this past Sunday.

Dear Mr. Trento,

I include below, Bill Keller’s response to allegations against Judith Miller’s reporting on weapons of mass destruction to which you refer as written to Daniel Okrent in light of other readers’ submitted concerns:

“I followed the WMD controversy at a bit of a distance before I moved into this job. When I learned I’d become executive editor I went back and re-read the coverage — and the criticism, which had acquired the power of passionate conventional wisdom. (A fair amount of the mail on this subject seemed to me to come from people who had not actually read the coverage, but had heard about it on the cyber-grapevine.) My survey of the material left me with two conclusions.

First, I did not see a prima facie case for recanting or repudiating the stories. The brief against the coverage was that it was insufficiently skeptical, but that is an easier claim to make in hindsight than in context. (By context I mean such things as, what others were writing at the time, what role editors played in handling and presenting the stories, how credible the sources were, etc.)
Second, lacking prima facie evidence, opening a docket and litigating the claims against the coverage was likely to consume more of my attention than I was willing to invest. I decided that, in the absence of more persuasive complaints than I have seen so far, I would base my assessment of Judy’s work on what she did on my watch.

My experience of Judy, most extensively when I was managing editor, is that she is a smart, well-sourced, industrious and fearless reporter with a keen instinct for news, and an appetite for dauntingly hard subjects — advanced weapons, terrorism, Middle East politics, etc. Her early coverage of Osama bin Laden was uniquely foresighted before 9/11, and was at least partly responsible for one of our Pulitzers. Like many aggressive reporters, particularly reporters who deal with contentious subjects, she has sometimes stepped on toes, but that is hardly grounds for rebuke. That was my assessment of Judy when I worked with her before, and nothing she has published in the paper since I became executive editor has caused me to think less of her.”

Thanks for writing,
Arthur Bovino
Office of the Public Editor
The New York Times

So Keller drank the Miller Kool-Aid. It must have been quite the shock when she admitted her WMD coverage was, in fact, wrong.

The fact that the Time’s thinks so little of its readers that it allowed Miller to stonewall her own colleagues at the newspaper in the story that was supposed to finally settle the matter is particularly amazing. Miller refused to share with them her notes or discuss her interactions with editors.

There is a pattern with Judy Miller. She collects information on stories that never appear in the newspaper. We at the PEC know this first hand through our bizarre experience with Judy Miller on terrorism financing when she sat on the information for months and when we informed her it was being moved to the Wall Street Journal’s Glenn Simpson, Miller put on a tirade. She then made a serious attempt to threaten my reporters by saying if we did give the information to another reporter she would make certain we would never “do business at the Times again.”

But of all the bizarre revelations in this case is Miller’s account of finding a notebook with versions of the name “Valerie Flame” (instead of Plame) in it and being unable to remember who gave her that information. That explanation is not credible. No reporter would ever forget a source that provided that level of detail. And, yes, you might do everything to protect that kind of source. She writes the reference to “Flame” appears in a separate section of her notes than those of her conversations with Libby. The question is, what section is that? Who was she speaking to at the time? We may never know because the Special Counsel in the Plame case cut a deal with Miller in which he is not allowed to ask her about any source but Libby.

Earlier in my career a government official leaked to me a document on a failed bank in Delaware. The document, called a “Troubled Bank Report,” had never before or since been leaked to a reporter out of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. To protect the source I allowed another reporter to write the story without my name on it. The FBI, despite an investigation, could find no connection between the suspected sources and the reporter who wrote the story. But the information got to our readers. That did not happen with Judy Miller. She outed her source and still hasn’t explained who leaked Plame’s name to her.

Even more puzzling is the fact that Jill Abramson, the no nonsense managing editor of the New York Times, says Miller’s claim that she pitched a story about the leak case simply isn’t true. Miller’s idiotic behavior is not a first among reporters. In my decades as a newsman I can recall many colleagues who confused their ability to be friendly with high level government officials with the ability to get significant and true information. Access does not guarantee truth as Miller learned with her WMD stories about Iraq. What usually happens to reporters who like to socialize with sources is what happened with Miller: You end up protecting illusionary sources on the chance that someday you might get something useful.

There is something else going on here that makes no sense. If a source is caught lying to me that automatically violates confidentiality. The reporter owes it to the readers or the audience to out whoever is responsible for the disinformation. Miller never did that with WMD. So who is Judy Miller protecting? The mutual protection pact that Libby entered with Miller is designed to insulate someone at a higher level. In Libby’s case it is the Vice President. In the case of Karl Rove it is George W. Bush. All Judy Miller’s account has done is raised more serious questions.

The great tragedy for Miller’s colleagues at the Time’s is that the good work they did on the Iraqi War (John Burns for example) got mixed up in the public mind with Miller’s fanciful reporting making the case for WMD in Iraq. If that is the case, we need to ask why Miller was given such latitude. Perhaps the answer can be found in what the Times has traditionally valued more than independent enterprise reporting: Direct access to the powerful.The Time’s has a history of allowing access to power to cloud their news judgment. An example of this is the publisher’s decision in 1961 not to do a story in advance exposing the Bay of Pigs Invasion

Now Miller admits she was wrong about WMD but blames her sources. Well since the sources she gave protection to lied to her and used Miler and her paper to sell a war that may be on the verge of destabilizing the entire Middle East it may be time for Miller to explain how she got to know these sources and introduce them to her readers by name. One thing is clear, the problems that produced a Jason Blair have not been fixed by canning Howell Raines and his managing editor. The Miller problem goes to the arrogance of the Time’s ownership and its intoxication over protecting its access to power.