ALL THE SMEARS FIT TO PRINT
NEW YORK POST
Editorial
October 25, 2005
The New York Times' newsroom has erupted in all-out civil war over reporter Judith Miller, recently released from 85 days imprisonment for refusing to identify a source — though she ultimately did so.
Columnists are publicly castigating Miller and demanding that she leave the paper. She and the Times' managing editor are calling each other a liar. The paper's executive editor is writing long memos to the staff accusing Miller of having "misled" her editors.
Even Publisher Arthur Sulzberger — once Miller's staunchest public defender — apparently has turned on her, endorsing Editor Bill Keller's memo and admitting that he bears some of the blame.
And the vicious hiding Miller got from columnist Maureen Dowd on Saturday was, in a word, execrable.
It's all eerily fascinating, in the way that a bloody car accident grabs the eye. But that's a problem for The Times to sort out, if the paper has any instinct for self-preservation.
Some points need to be made, however.
First and foremost, the "Dump on Judy" movement — both within and outside the Times — seems based not on her behavior in this matter but rather the left's continued fury over articles she wrote about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
That her reporting appears to have been wrong — at least about the presence of WMD stockpiles at the start of the war — is taken by her critics as symbolic of the war itself: Discredit her, and you've discredited the Bush administration.
In other words, this isn't about journalistic ethics — it's about partisan politics.
Fact is, Judith Miller did some groundbreaking work on the Islamist threat in general, and Saddam Hussein in particular. Much of what we came to know in both areas came about from her pre-9/11 reporting on al Qaeda, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Journalism, it's often been said, is the first rough draft of history. Freedom of the press gives those of us in this business some wide latitude in our rush to inform the public as fully and as quickly as possible; sometimes, unfortunately, our reporting will be wrong.
It would be nice if journalists had the luxury of being able to wait until they were 100 percent certain, beyond all possible doubt, that every word they write is undeniably accurate before letting their stories see print.
But that's not the way the real world operates — as Miller's critics well know.
There are chapters in this saga remaining to be written (the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame affair presently will be weighing in), so final judgment is decidedly premature.
But — bottom line — Judith Miller deserves better than what she's gotten to date from The New York Times.
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