Judy Miller Fights Back with Letters to Dowd and Calame
Maureen Dowd
By Joe Strupp
Published: November 13, 2005 9:55 AM ET
NEW YORK Judith Miller will not go gently into that good night. Her public relations offensive, which had already taken her to CNN with Larry King and to National Public Radio and elsewhere, now includes angry published letters to two of her antagonists, former colleague Maureen Dowd and New York Times Public Editor Barney Calame.
Between the lines, she has also been critical of Executive Editor Bill Keller and a top managing editor Jill Abramson. Now, will any of them hit back? Surely the Times hoped to put this fight behind them in working out a severance deal with the embattled reporter. But now, calling herself a "free woman," no longer a part of the Times "convent," she can blast away all she likes.
Miller had already voiced her displeasure with Dowd in her TV and radio appearances late this week, essentially accusing her of being disloyal and sticking a knife in her back. Dowd had visited her in jail during her recent 85 day incarceration for failure to reveal a source in the Plame/CIA leak scandal, but then belatedly attacked her as the "Woman of Mass Destruction" in a column.
Now, in an open letter to Dowd posted on her Web site, Miller writes, "I agree with you that reporters must be more than stenographers. The same is true of columnists. I hope you will correct the record soon."
And this morning, in his periodic letters-from-readers column, Calame made an exception in printing a special letter-from-former-colleague.
It may not help her with Keller, however, as she divulges in that letter the personal praise she says he heaped on her first-person account of her grand jury testimony which has since been criticized within and outside the newspaper.
"My own account of my grand jury testimony," she writes to Calame, "prompted Bill Keller to call the draft ‘heroic.’ ‘This is really fascinating,’ he wrote. ‘You have managed the delicate task of cautious attribution and qualification without draining the narrative of life.’ He called it ‘an important contribution.’"
Meanwhile, in her letter to Dowd, she charges that "in the interests of journalistic accuracy at a very sensitive time for The Times and for me, I wish you had checked some of these damaging assertions about me before you printed them. If you had, there are seven specific mistakes you could have avoided. As important, you could have avoided creating a false and damaging impression that I had tried to cover up for a crime, or that I had convenient memory lapses at the behest of the administration."
She then asserts, among other things, that she did not mislead Times colleague Phil Taubman; that she did not need "a leash" and was "insubordinate"; that she had only agreed to identify Scooter Libby as a "former Hill staffer" for listening purposes; that it is Jill Abramson who is wrong in her memory of a key conversation; that she honestly can't remember how the name "Valerie Flame" got in her notebook.
Her letter to Calame repeats parts of this, after Miller complains that since her WMD reporting had proved dangerously wrong, "I have been attacked by bloggers, gossip columnists and by The Times itself, most recently by its internal critic.”
Calame took issue with Miller’s actions in an Oct. 23 column, noting among other things "new information that suggested the journalistic practices of Ms. Miller and Times editors were more flawed than I had feared.”
Miller's reply today includes the following:
"You accuse me of taking journalistic ‘shortcuts,’ but take your own by supplying no evidence. You prefer to believe Jill Abramson, who says that she does not recall my suggestion in July 2003 that we pursue the implications of my conversation about Joe Wilson. But I remember this vividly, for it occurred amid the departure of Howell Raines, a time of crisis for senior editors, when she may have been rather preoccupied. But you, without a shred of evidence one way or the other, choose to believe Jill and not me. What one believes on the basis of no evidence simply exposes one's prejudice and is otherwise meaningless....
“You still don't understand the reference in my notes to Libby as a ‘former Hill staffer.’ I agreed only to listen to him on that basis. Had I decided to use his information, I would have renegotiated the attribution as I had routinely done on countless occasions, or I would not have printed his remarks. Had you not taken a "shortcut" and had you checked my previous work with editors, you would not have found a single false attribution on my record....
“The day after I testified before the grand jury, The Times, in two long articles, misconstrued my reasons for finally agreeing to testify by quoting with approval the self-serving statement by Libby's lawyer that his client's original, coerced waiver would have met my demands as fully as the written, personal, uncoerced waiver that Libby finally gave me. A tsunami of hostile blogs followed, which seems to have led The Times to defend itself at my expense, an instance of which is your own column.
“From there it's been all downhill, culminating in your column.”
The question now is, have we heard the last of Miller’s views? And will the Times feel the need itself to respond? Stay tuned.
editorandpublisher.com |
