Posted on 07/20/2005 10:56:56 AM PDT by Range Rover
The Miller Crusade Diminishes the Press
By Joe Conason
Very few of the journalists rallying behind New York Times reporter Judith Miller seem thrilled about defending her, no matter how strongly they believe in shielding sources. While they may admire her guts in going to jail, their lack of enthusiasm for her case is understandable.
She leaves much to be desired as a martyr for the First Amendment. Based on both past performance and present circumstance, she actually symbolizes a terrible betrayal of the public trust by the national media. And whatever she and her employers think they’re achieving in defiance of the special counsel investigating the Valerie Wilson case, her conduct will inevitably diminish the reputation and power of the press.
Her coverage of Iraq and those still-missing weapons of mass destruction was marked by arrogance, incompetence and eagerness to advance the agenda of the Bush White House. Those seem to be the hallmarks of her current misadventure as well. Having written very bad stories that helped drive the country into war against a nonexistent threat, she is now creating very bad law for press freedom.
Curiously, the sources she is protecting today are the same people who staged the war propaganda, in which she played her notorious starring role.
More at: NYO
(Excerpt) Read more at observer.com ...
They hope we all have amnesia and will forget we ever heard the term WMD for the past ten years.
Uh.....Rove gave her a legal waver. She can tell anything she knows about him. He doesn't care. Some "martyr", aye?
It's not Rove she's covering up for. Rove is just a distraction so Fitzgerald can get his work done without the press breathing down his back.
Waiver.
But maybe there's another source, one who has NOT given her permission to identify him.
A Pew Research Center poll says only 50 percent of the public is closely following reports on White House adviser Karl Rove and the leak about a CIA agent.
Wilson. Heh heh heh.
Exactly - a CIA WMD "expert" leaking to a NYT WMD "expert" reporter; doesn't sound too farfetched to me.
What if someone in the CIA was leaking classified information to influence the 2004 election?
Miller is actually one of the New York Times's more honest reporters. I'm still not sure what on earth she is up to. There are suspicions that Pinch Sulzberger tried to set up Karl Rove and was in on this with Richards from the first. But Miller is not one of their more fanatical leftists.
Did Pinch threaten to fire her?
In September 2002, the British government published a white paper in which it made public British intelligence's belief that Saddam had tried to buy uranium in Africa. A month later, the CIA received from an Italian source documents purporting to show that Niger and Iraq had done a deal. These turned out to be forgeries.
President Bush mentioned the British findings in his State of the Union address in January 2003. In his leaks to Pincus, and earlier to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Wilson claimed Bush knew this was false. The key sentence in Pincus' story is this:
"Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong,' the former U.S. government official said."
. Wilson's official role ended when he returned from Niger in March. The CIA didn't get the Italian forgeries until October. Wilson had no access to them. He either was making up what he told Kristof and Pincus, or he had received an unauthorized leak of classified information..
Wilson as in MR. Wilson was probably pimping his wife's 'connected' status and shopping her around as a confidential source all along. Miller has been shown to throw tidbits gained through questionable relationships around to boost a story like she did cold-calling a specific charity front to get a quote just before a planned raid.
Bottom line is that Miller is not protecting ANYONE in the White House but is more likely staying mum to 1)Boost her street cred as a foot soldier of the MSM 2)Protect those who she should not have been getting info from in the first place and 3)Cover the butt of the NYT and its complicit role in all of this and MORE.
"Her coverage of Iraq and those still-missing weapons of mass destruction was marked by arrogance, incompetence and eagerness to ADVANCE(?) the agenda of the Bush White House"..... that HAS to be either a misprint or some kind of Freudian slip
I'm cooking right now between threads. I don't have much time to read, so I surfed DU for their pretty pictures news. Get this thread..
Sudden thought about right wing "Rovegate" spin...
Has anybody heard right wing loonies announce "Joe Wilson is a liar. Dick Cheney didn't send him, like he claimed."?
Besides being a lie in itself, it raises interesting questions....So Cheney didn't CARE that a fake memo was bolstering the case for war? He didn't want to know that an obvious and glaring fraud WAS a fraud before he pushed for war? Why the hell not?
They have absolutely no idea what's going on. *sigh*
No typo there...I read it twice too. This looks to be the first trial balloon sent up to turn Miller's rep from NYT reporter (with all the prerequesite lib mindset/ideology)to "Actual Conservative Apologist Working Undercover at the NYT Unbeknownst To Her Editors".
She's being thrown under the wheels.
This has got to be a made up number. I am as skeptical of polls as I am of major news outlets. Polls are done in an effort to create news. The poll results become news. Polling organizations, therefore, are engaged in the creation of news, just like the so-called news media. It would surprise me greatly if that many people really cared one way or another. I care because I want to see Wilson and Wilson crash and burn. The other side cares because they hate Bush. But in between, most of America doesn't really give a darn.
Someone should "leak" that info to HER. I doubt it would brighten her day. It might even get her angry enough to say "Screw them. I'm spilling my guts!"
Word is that The American Society of Journalists and Authors had Ms. Miller up for an award - something to do with her refusal to name sources, etc.....they're rethinking that now according to something appearing on Editor and Publisher's site this morning:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000981247
The American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), a 50-year-old group of some 1,100 non-fiction independent writers, had proposed giving Miller its "Conscience in the Media" award earlier this week. The group's nine-member First Amendment Committee voted on Monday to recommend that the award be given, a recommendation that the group's full board of directors will consider on July 28. But the recommendation was far from universal, with the committee voting 5-4 in favor of the prize, and many members protesting afterward.
The proposed award has already promped at least one member of the First Amendment Committee to quit the panel. Anita Bartholomew, a freelance journalist who has contributed to Reader's Digest, among others, told E&P she would rather leave the committee than take part in giving Miller an award.
"The First Amendment is designed to prevent government interference with a free press. Miller, by shielding a government official or officials who attempted to use the press to retaliate against a whistleblower, and scare off other would-be whistleblowers, has allied herself with government interference with, and censorship of, whistleblowers," Bartholomew wrote in a resignation letter provided to E&P. "When your source IS the government, and the government is attempting to use you to target a whistleblower, the notion of shielding a source must be reconsidered. To apply standard practices regarding sources to hiding wrongdoing at the highest levels of government perverts the intent of the First Amendment. .
Hmmmmmm. Odd kind of justice that Miller may be denied an award for being accused of protecting a source she's not, in all liklihood, actually protecting.
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