Josh Marshall: Something else up with Milller/Times article

[Gloria]

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_10_16.php#006765
October 17, 2005 -- 07:46 PM EDT // link // print)

I've been mulling over the New York Times dimension of the Plame story for the last day or so. And one thing seems more and more clear to me. This isn't a judgment made on particular reporting, more a sense or just intuition. So let me just briefly share it with you.

SNIP

There's something similar happening here.

When you read the Times Sunday article plus Miller's apologia, there's too much there that is simply inexplicable in terms of what we already know. Going into this mess Miller's reputation was already severely checkered and her journalistic judgment very much in question. And yet Sulzberger and Keller (the first in the van, the second following with an odd passivity) staked the reputation of the Times itself on her and went along for this whole ride without even getting the most basic information from her about what had happened?

Simple poor judgment doesn't explain that for me. Something else is up.

Now, I know it seems like I'm hinting ominously about some deep dark secret. Really, I have no idea what it is. But there's a whole piece to this puzzle, probably the most telling one, that we haven't yet seen.

[cantstandbush]

1. I agree with Mr. Marshall. n/t

[Garbo 2004]

2. Yeah, it just doesn't make logical sense, even if Judy had pics of "Pinch"

cavorting with barnyard animals. That could be dealt with without, one would assume, without letting her appear to hold the NYT hostage.

[spindrifter]

3. Maybe there is something deeply sinister

to this story. On the other hand, let's remember how the NYT let J. Blair run amok, even though there were clear signs that what he was doing was not on the up-and-up or at the very least people around him were being enablers of someone wih a significant drug problem.
Then let's look at J*dy. Okay, she's a reporter with a certain cachet who recently shared a Pulitzer. From everything in the news she was an ego gone wild--or perhaps an ego on the manic phase of some bipolarity. She gets herself a hot little embed situation, then tries to boss around he Army guys as though she's the head of the joint chiefs. She's got super access to "Washington insiders," she's a self-promoter. The editors let her run amok--as though they really don't want to get into it with her, even though they have other reporters saying they won't work with her. A great case of asleep at the wheel, editors!

[realFedUp]

4. Perhaps Sulzberger and Keller were aware, if not complicit

of Judy's special clearance credential. Perhaps
they were complicit in promoting the invasion
of Iraq.

The Bushies are so controlling that I can't imagine
that either reporters or administration are operating
on their own.

[Scout1071]

5. Check this out - according to Wikipedia, they go way back:

"Miller started at the Washington bureau of the New York Times in 1977, part of a new breed of hungry young hires, prodded in part by the sting of the Times losing the Watergate story to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post. She and Steven Rattner, her boyfriend, also a Times reporter, became close friends of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the son of the then-publisher of the Times, whose first job at the Times, starting in 1978, was also as a reporter of the Washington bureau. For several summers, Miller and Rattner shared a weekend house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with Sulzberger and his wife, Gail. (Sulzberger would become publisher of the Times in 1992 in his own right.)"



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller_(journalist)#Background

[DeepModem Mom]

6. That little tidbit could explain a lot -- thanks, Scout. nt

[Scout1071]

8. I know, I'm kind of surprised this isn't being discussed more.

A new breed of reporters, indeed.

[chat_noir]

7. Ménage à Quatre?

Definitely interesting search on Google. :eyes:

[Garbo 2004]

10. Yeah it's been common knowledge that the publisher and Ms. Judy are old

buds. Marshall surely knows that. But is Pinch such a lousy newspaperman/businessman that he lets her bring down the Times in an unprecedented manner just for friendship's sake?

Is it just that simple?

[KoKo]

9. Some Background from New York Mag on Judy's WMD Experience, plus

her dealings with "Suicided David Kelly of GB who Exposed the "Sexed Up Dossier on WMD" that Blair pushed while Chimp & Co. were pushing WMD here


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New York Magazine.......SNIP

By the late nineties, she was focused largely on the nexus between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Her dispatches from the region frequently contained nightmare scenarios. One piece, co-written with William Broad, warned that “a pilotless plane spraying 200 pounds of anthrax near a large city might kill up to a million people—if the winds were right, if no rain fell, if the nozzles did not get clogged, if the particles were the right size, if the population had no vaccinations, and so on.” It might have seemed like a risk too far-fetched to mention, but she felt compelled to mention it. The country at the time seemed to be enjoying the equivalent of that sunny day at the Hilton. The economy was booming, and the biggest problem seemed to be managing prosperity—and a president’s personal failings. “Remember, everyone was obsessed with the White House sex story,” says New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who was invited by the paper to join Miller in an investigation unit to examine Al Qaeda. Goldberg found her an impossibly difficult colleague. But he also realized her value. “She happened to be prescient about the rise of the global jihad. And it was her unpleasant hyper-aggressiveness that enabled her to help force a very important story—the possibility of a marriage between WMD proliferators and global jihadists—closer to the top of the agenda.”

Before September 11, Miller, with her anxieties about anthrax attacks, could seem like Chicken Little; afterward, she seemed more liked Cassandra, the only one who’d been right. And this fact gave her tremendous power at the paper. Eight months before the attacks, she published a piece documenting Al Qaeda’s WMD ambitions—part of a series that later earned her (along with several colleagues) a Pulitzer. Germs, a book about bioterrorism co-written with two Times colleagues, appeared less than a month after the attacks and soon hit the best-seller list. She began making regular appearances on CNN and PBS, becoming a public face of the paper—a celebrity that grimly solidified when she received a hoax letter at her desk containing a white, powdery substance resembling anthrax.

What’s more, she had spent several decades acquiring access to Washington’s Middle East experts, some of whom suddenly wielded tremendous influence in the Bush administration. Miller’s many doubters at the Times were effectively silenced. She had emerged as one of the paper’s biggest stars, with the kind of “competitive metabolism” that new editor Howell Raines—he’d taken over from Joseph Lelyveld the week before 9/11—made into a crusade. According to a friend of Raines’s, as well as one of Miller’s colleagues at the paper, the editor pulled her aside after the attacks. “Go win a Pulitzer,” he told her.

For the next two years, she supplied the paper with a string of grim exclusives. There was the defector who described Saddam Hussein’s recent renovation of storage facilities for nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. There was her report that a Russian virologist might have handed the regime a particularly virulent strain of smallpox. To protect themselves against VX and sarin, she further reported, the Iraqis had greatly increased the importation of an antidote to these agents. And, most memorably, she co-wrote a piece in which administration officials suggested that Iraq had attempted to import aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons. Vice-President Dick Cheney trumpeted the story on Meet the Press, closing the circle. Of course, each of the stories contained important caveats. But together they painted a horrifying picture. There was just one problem with them: The vast majority of these blockbusters turned out to be wrong.

Long before Miller’s current difficulties, she was known at the paper for a different sin: rudeness, amplified by a legendary temper. Seth Faison, a foreign correspondent who has punched his ticket with the Times in China, tells the following story: In 1993, Miller had been billeted over to the Metro desk from her day job as a staff writer at the Times Magazine to help report on the World Trade Center bombing. Faison, a young Metro reporter, had left the office for jury duty. During his absence, Miller ensconced herself at his desk. “I had been at the Times for less than two years, and I’m not a very assertive person. And so I just said, ‘Judy, could I sit here?’ She said, ‘You have to go someplace else.’ ”

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:DOvp80NrQvIJ:newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/index1.html+Howell+Raines,Judith+Miller&hl=en

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