Judith Miller: From the Times to the nuts

[IScreamSundays]

Source: Salon

Judith Miller used to be a superstar. She was a major reporter at the New York Times for decades -- at the DC bureau, in Cairo, in Paris, special correspondent to the Persian Gulf, embedded with a special unit in Iraq. She had the best sources. She had amazing scoops. Now she's writing -- on contract, not full-time -- for Newsmax, a goofy right-wing magazine where conservatives you've never heard of (and John Stossel, apparently) report, constantly, that Barack Obama is bad and unpopular. It's a steep fall, and it couldn't have happened to a worse journalist.

Since her early days at the Times, when she inserted CIA misinformation into a piece on Libya, she's always been a tool of power. She was the voice of the Defense Department, embedded at the Times. She was hyping bullshit stories about Iraq's WMD capabilities as far back as 1998, and in the run-up to the war, her front-page scoops were cited by the Bush administration as evidence that Saddam needed to be taken out, right away.

Lying exile grifter Ahmad Chalabi fed her the worst of the nonsense designed to push America into toppling Saddam Hussein (and giving Iraq to him), and she pushed that nonsense into the newspaper of record. She got everything wrong, and for some insane reason, she remained employed at the Times until 2005, when she negotiated her separation from her longtime professional home.

There was also the extended farce in which she went to jail to "protect" Scooter Libby, who had given her permission to "reveal" his role in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name, which did net her some sort of "First Amendment award" (for excellence in the field of comforting the powerful), and finally embarrassed the Times enough to get rid of her.

Read more: http://www.salon.com/news/media_criticism/?story=/politics/war_room/2010/12/30/judy_miller_newsmax

[SpiralHawk]

1. Slumming with her own kind

America does not need any more bought-and-sold pretend journalist propaganda pimps such as staff NewsMax and Fox...

[leveymg]

2. It would have been more dignified for her to just stay quiet,

and find an honest job. Newsmax - what a joke.

[The Backlash Cometh]

3. We all would be better off if she began there.

[Javaman]

4. Bullshit finds it's own level.

Like the old saying goes, "you can't shit the shitter".

miller had been shitting folks for years, until, someone called her on her bullshit.

When her cover was blown and her water carrying self was revealed, she went into the journalistic wilderness.

Now she rises again, like a burnout phoenix working at a half backed half witted propaganda outfit with as much credibility as a fox guarding a hen house, she now writes to her level of fiction prose.

miller, in other words, is a hack.

[BonnieJW]

6. And always was.

She was never a journalist. She took dictation.

[msanthrope]

5. I guess the forest of aspens withered and died, didn't it? n/t

[mmonk]

7. Recommended.

[Iggo]

8. That story should be printed in the NYT. (n/t)