Posted on 12/01/2005 12:54:32 PM PST by Lorianne
There are high and low reasons for following the thrilling spills of Judith Miller. High reasons include a tangle over Iraq policy that could cripple the Bush administration. Low reasons include rivals' delight at seeing the pomposity of the New York Times punctured yet again. But there's also an overarching horror of an issue to come to grips with.
Miller refused to name her sources in the Plamegate affair. Who had these cherished sources been? Certainly the vice-president's right-hand man. Possibly Karl Rove, George Bush's super-spinner.
Why did they need to be protected? As Michael Kinsley, one of America's shrewdest commentators, puts it: 'An exemption for journalists from the basic citizen's duty to co-operate with law enforcement is supposed to encourage troublemakers who want to tell truth to power. But Miller was being used by people in power ... to undermine a troublemaker.' In short, the conversations that Miller had were the crime (of disclosing a CIA agent's identity) itself. 'If the reporter is immune from testifying, the law in question might as well not be on the books'.
A 'duty to protect sources', then, can't be absolute. The protection it gives is problematic. And Ms Miller hasn't stopped throwing up messy issues yet. Did she tell her line editor in Washington, honestly and openly, what was going on? No. Did she tell her editor and publisher back in New York everything they should have known before they began spending millions in her defence? No again.
How, then, did they control her? They didn't. 'The paper's leadership,' says the NYT's belated account of the case, '... left the major decisions ... up to Miller, an intrepid reporter whom editors found it hard to control'.
(Excerpt) Read more at observer.guardian.co.uk ...
End of article for me.
Exactly, post under "Comedy" or "Alternative"
And what is Novak waiting for?
What she DID do, by getting herself thrown in jail, is extend the investigation one year so that Fitz issued indictments THIS October instead of surprising us LAST October at election time.
She answered the question. Her particular source was Libby.
Does this guy even read the newspapers?
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