IN THE MIDST of the media's love-fest for Judith Miller, First Amendment Martyr, it's easy to forget that Miller's questionable journalistic ethics left her in the doghouse only a year ago. Indeed, when it came to leaks, the only people busier than White House staffers last year were the denizens of The New York Times' newsroom, who fell all over themselves to excoriate Miller to competing publications.
Quoted in a June 2004 story in New York magazine, for instance, one anonymous co-worker said: "When I see her coming, my instinct is to go the other way." By many accounts, Miller is rude, competitive and heartless, willing to pursue a hot story at any price. In at least one instance, she reportedly used the name of a source who had provided information only on condition that her name not appear.
It was Miller, more than any other reporter, who helped the White House sell its weapons-of-mass-destruction-in-Iraq hokum to the American public. Relying on the repeatedly discredited Ahmad Chalabi and her carefully cultivated administration contacts, Miller wrote story after story on the supposedly imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
Only problem: Her scoops relied on information provided by the very folks who were also cooking the books. But because Miller hid behind confidential sources most of the time, there was little her readers could use to evaluate their credibility. You know: "a high-level official with access to classified data." Ultimately, even The Times' "public editor" conceded the paper's coverage of Iraq had often consisted of "breathless stories built on unsubstantiated "revelations" that, in many instances, were the anonymity-cloaked assertions of people with vested interests."
http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showa.html?article=57463
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