The New York Time's self-inflicted wounds

New York Times's Misguided Crusade
Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr demonstrates the old saying that the intelligence in prominent familes decreases with each generation.---BBB

New York Times's Misguided Crusade
By Robert Scheer
Common Dreams
Tuesday 18 October 2005

Media corporations are arguably the most important yet least examined centers of power in our society. The owners of the Fourth Estate have a unique ability to direct the searchlight of inquiry upon others while remaining powerfully positioned to deflect it from themselves.

That is the blunt message of the belated but devastating report in Sunday's New York Times on how the paper turned reporter Judith Miller's "case into a cause." In its zeal to present its own discredited reporter as a 1st Amendment hero, the "paper of record" badly neutered its news department's coverage of the Miller saga and deployed its editorial page as a battering ram in her defense, publishing 15 editorials supporting Miller's protection of her White House source.

"The Times . . . limited its own ability to cover aspects of one of the biggest scandals of the day," concluded the front-page article. "Even as the paper asked for the public's support, it was unable to answer its questions."

The paper, led by publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., waged a nonstop public crusade not just to protect Miller in the courts but to make her an outright heroine - obscuring the fact that she was not protecting the public's right to know but was abetting the Bush administration in its shameless and possibly criminal attempt to discredit a whistle-blower. That whistle-blower, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, had enraged the administration by exposing its use of faked WMD evidence as justification for invading Iraq.

For reasons that are still murky (and which are not made clearer by her own lengthy statement printed in the same edition), Miller argues that a waiver signed last year by Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, was not good enough to allow her to testify and that simply asking Libby point-blank whether he had signed the waiver willingly would have been somehow unethical.

"She has the keys to release herself," the judge said when holding Miller in contempt of court for refusing to testify. "She has a waiver she chooses not to recognize."

To understand how the New York Times got to this embarrassing point, it must be acknowledged that even at highly regarded newspapers, editors serve at the whim of their publishers. What is clear from the Times' Sunday exposé is that publisher Sulzberger granted Miller uncritical backing despite the severe reservations felt by some of the paper's top editors.

Douglas Frantz, then the investigative editor at the New York Times and now managing editor of the L.A. Times, is quoted as saying Miller once called herself "Miss Run Amok," and when he asked her what that meant, she said, "I can do whatever I want."

Others at the New York Times, including top editors, had become highly suspicious of her sourcing on Iraq WMD stories. They even went so far as to publish an "Editor's Note" questioning the paper's own coverage of the run-up to the war - with particular emphasis on five of Miller's pieces. But those well-honed editorial sensibilities didn't matter much once the publisher weighed in.

Despite being abysmally ignorant of some of the case's details, the publisher granted Miller total license to define her stonewalling of the grand jury as a freedom-of-the-press battle.

"This car had her hand on the wheel because she was the one at risk," Sulzberger said, ignoring the risks to the paper's integrity. There were also other lives, careers and reputations in the balance, particular that of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame, her covert contacts who had helped her track down WMD, and her ex-diplomat husband.

Yet Sulzberger's insistence that Miller was the true victim carried the day at the paper his family owns. As Miller put it in honest, if gloating, terms: "He galvanized the editors, the senior editorial staff. He metaphorically and literally put his arm around me."

Evidently galvanizing the editors led to their suspending the profound doubts that they felt concerning Miller's tactics and standards as a reporter. Perhaps most damaging in Sunday's article is the admission that an article on Libby and Plamegate was apparently squashed by top management to protect Miller.

"It was taken pretty clearly among us as a signal that we were cutting too close to the bone, that we were getting into an area that could complicate Judy's situation," said Richard Stevenson, one of the censored reporters.

As for Miller, she seems to still have no clue as to what it means to be an ethical journalist. "We have everything to be proud of and nothing to apologize for," she stated, apparently referring to herself and to the great newspaper she was allowed to corrupt.

Keller Memo Admits 'Mistakes,' Regrets in Miller Saga
Keller Memo Admits 'Mistakes,' Regrets in Miller Saga
The New York Times Co.
Bill Keller
By E&P Staff
Published: October 21, 2005 6:11 PM ET
NEW YORK

A Message from Bill Keller:

Colleagues,

As you can imagine, I've done a lot of thinking -- and a lot of listening -- on the subject of what I should have done differently in handling our reporter's entanglement in the White House leak investigation. Jill and John and I have talked a great deal among ourselves and with many of you, and while this is a discussion that will continue, we thought it would be worth taking a first cut at the lessons we have learned.

Aside from a number of occasions when I wish I had chosen my words more carefully, we've come up with a few points at which we wish we had made different decisions. These are instances, when viewed with the clarity of hindsight, where the mistakes carry lessons beyond the peculiar circumstances of this case.

I wish we had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD as soon as I became executive editor. At the time, we thought we had compelling reasons for kicking the issue down the road. The paper had just been through a major trauma, the Jayson Blair episode, and needed to regain its equilibrium. It felt somehow unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors. I was trying to get my arms around a huge new job, appoint my team, get the paper fully back to normal, and I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction.

So it was a year before we got around to really dealing with the controversy. At that point, we published a long editors' note acknowledging the prewar journalistic lapses, and -- to my mind, at least as important - - we intensified aggressive reporting aimed at exposing the way bad or manipulated intelligence had fed the drive to war. (I'm thinking of our excellent investigation of those infamous aluminum tubes, the report on how the Iraqi National Congress recruited exiles to promote Saddam's WMD threat, our close look at the military's war-planning intelligence, and the dissection, one year later, of Colin Powell's U.N. case for the war, among other examples. The fact is sometimes overlooked that a lot of the best reporting on how this intel fiasco came about appeared in the NYT.)

By waiting a year to own up to our mistakes, we allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, we fear, we fostered an impression that The Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers. If we had lanced the WMD boil earlier, we might have damped any suspicion that THIS time, the paper was putting the defense of a reporter above the duty to its readers.

I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own. It is a natural and proper instinct to defend reporters when the government seeks to interfere in our work. And under other circumstances it might have been fine to entrust the details -- the substance of the confidential interviews, the notes -- to lawyers who would be handling the case. But in this case I missed what should have been significant alarm bells. Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (In November of 2003 Phil Taubman tried to ascertain whether any of our correspondents had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper.

In the end, I'm pretty sure I would have concluded that we had to fight this case in court. For one thing, we were facing an insidious new menace in these blanket waivers, ostensibly voluntary, that Administration officials had been compelled to sign. But if I had known the details of Judy's entanglement with Libby, I'd have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense, and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises.

Dick Stevenson has expressed the larger lesson here in an e-mail that strikes me as just right: "I think there is, or should be, a contract between the paper and its reporters. The contract holds that the paper will go to the mat to back them up institutionally -- but only to the degree that the reporter has lived up to his or her end of the bargain, specifically to have conducted him or herself in a way consistent with our legal, ethical and journalistic standards, to have been open and candid with the paper about sources, mistakes, conflicts and the like, and generally to deserve having the reputations of all of us put behind him or her. In that way, everybody knows going into a battle exactly what the situation is, what we're fighting for, the degree to which the facts might counsel compromise or not, and the degree to which our collective credibility should be put on the line."

I've heard similar sentiments from a number of reporters in the aftermath of this case.

There is another important issue surfaced by this case: how we deal with the inherent conflict of writing about ourselves. This paper (and, indeed, this business) has had way too much experience of that over the past few years. Almost everyone we've heard from on the staff appreciates that once we had agreed as an institution to defend Judy's source, it would have been wrong to expose her source in the paper. Even if our reporters had learned that information through their own enterprise, our publication of it would have been seen by many readers as authoritative -- as outing Judy's source in a backhanded way. Yet it is excruciating to withhold information of value to our readers, especially when rival publications are unconstrained. I don't yet see a clear-cut answer to this dilemma, but we've received some thoughtful suggestions from the staff, and it's one of the problems that we'll be wrestling with in the coming weeks.

Best, Bill
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Maureen Dowd On Judy Miller: "Woman Of Mass Destruction"
Dowd On Judy Miller: "Woman Of Mass Destruction"...
New York Times
Maureen Dowd
Posted October 22, 2005 10:27 AM

Excerpt [...] An Associated Press story yesterday reported that Judy had coughed up the details of an earlier meeting with Mr. Libby only after prosecutors confronted her with a visitor log showing that she had met with him on June 23, 2003. This cagey confusion is what makes people wonder whether her stint in the Alexandria jail was in part a career rehabilitation project.

Judy refused to answer a lot of questions put to her by Times reporters, or show the notes that she shared with the grand jury. I admire Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller for aggressively backing reporters in the cross hairs of a prosecutor. But before turning Judy's case into a First Amendment battle, they should have nailed her to a chair and extracted the entire story of her escapade.

Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country." If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

Assumptions Raised by the Latest Keller-Culpa
Assumptions Raised by the Latest Keller-Culpa
Arriane Huffington
10/22/05

So here is the latest Bill Keller memo to his staff. And here are my take-aways from it:

I'm assuming he did this Keller-culpa under duress -- he didn't really want to but he's smart and knew he had to.

I'm assuming that his memo "slipped out" on Friday because he knows that on Sunday the paper's public editor, Barney Calame, is going to write a devastating critique of the Times and he wanted to do some pre-emptive self-flagellation.

I'm assuming that Keller has not yet accepted that Judy Miller is only one part of the Times' problem -- that he must also confront an institutional arrogance that extends beyond one rogue reporter.

I'm assuming that Judy Miller has written her last story for the New York Times.

I'm assuming Keller wishes he hadn't been so quick to give a speech earlier this month blasting bloggers, the Wall Street Journal, and everyone but himself.

I'm assuming that neither this memo -- nor Calame's critique -- will put this story to bed. Not by a long shot.

I'm assuming, as I've been saying for months, that this ends up going all the way to Sulzberger.

NY Times, Miller Fight Over CIA Leak Probe
NY Times, Miller Fight Over CIA Leak Probe
NY Times, Reporter Engage in Public Fight About Her Seeming Lack of Candor in CIA Leak Probe
By PETE YOST
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON

In the latest fallout from the CIA leak investigation, reporter Judith Miller and The New York Times are engaging in a very public fight about her seeming lack of candor in the case.

In a memo to the staff, Executive Editor Bill Keller says Miller "seems to have misled" the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, who said Miller told him in the fall of 2003 that she was not one of the recipients of a leak about the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Miller says Keller's criticism is "seriously inaccurate."

"I certainly never meant to mislead Phil, nor did I mislead him," Miller was quoted as saying in a Times story Saturday.

According to a Times story on Oct. 16, Miller told Taubman two years ago that the subject of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson and Wilson's wife, Plame, had come up in casual conversation with government officials, but that Miller said "she had not been at the receiving end of a concerted effort, a deliberate organized effort to put out information."

In recent weeks, Miller testified to the grand jury in the leak probe that she had discussed Wilson and his wife in three conversations with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in June and July of 2003.

Keller wrote that if he had known of Miller's "entanglement" with Libby, he might have been more willing to explore compromises with the prosecutor who was trying to get her testimony for the criminal investigation into the leak of Plame's identity.

Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. She was freed on Sept. 29 when she finally agreed to testify.

Responding to Keller's criticism, Miller told the newspaper, "I was unaware that there was a deliberate, concerted disinformation campaign to discredit Wilson and that if there had been, I did not think I was a target of it."

"As for your reference to my 'entanglement' with Mr. Libby, I had no personal, social or other relationship with him except as a source," Miller said.

Underlying the issue is Miller's own flawed prewar reporting on Iraq.

Her stories pointing to the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq helped clear a path for the administration's arguments in favor of going to war. No weapons of mass destruction have been found, and Keller said he regretted waiting a year before confronting problems with Miller's reporting.

In his memo, Keller wrote that the newspaper in the summer of 2003 had just been through the trauma of the Jayson Blair episode, in which a reporter was found to have fabricated articles, resulting in the departure of the Times' executive editor and managing editor.

"It felt somehow unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors," Keller wrote. By waiting more than a year, he said, "We allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, we fear, we fostered an impression that the Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers."

Op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd weighed in with further criticism in Saturday's Times. "Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, (Miller) was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers," Dowd wrote.

If Miller returns to covering national security issues, Dowd wrote, "the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands."

In a column written for Sunday's editions of The Times, public editor Byron Calame wrote, "It seems to me that whatever the limits put on her, the problems facing her inside and outside the newsroom will make it difficult for her to return to the paper as a reporter."

The Miller Mess: Lingering Issues Among the Answers
October 23, 2005
The Public Editor - New York Times
The Miller Mess: Lingering Issues Among the Answers
By BYRON CALAME
The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.

THE good news is that the bad news didn't stop The New York Times from publishing a lengthy front-page article last Sunday about the issues facing Judith Miller and the paper, or from pushing Ms. Miller to give readers a first-person account of her grand jury testimony.

The details laid out in the commendable 6,200-word article by a special team of reporters and editors led by the paper's deputy managing editor answered most of my fundamental questions. At issue, of course, was Ms. Miller's refusal to divulge her confidential sources to the grand jury investigating who had leaked the identity of a C.I.A. undercover operative. But the article and Ms. Miller's account also uncovered new information that suggested the journalistic practices of Ms. Miller and Times editors were more flawed than I had feared.

The Times must now face up to three major concerns raised by the leak investigation: First, the tendency by top editors to move cautiously to correct problems about prewar coverage. Second, the journalistic shortcuts taken by Ms. Miller. And third, the deferential treatment of Ms. Miller by editors who failed to dig into problems before they became a mess.

To begin considering the handling of Ms. Miller and this whole episode, it is necessary to step back more than two years. Ms. Miller may still be best known for her role in a series of Times articles in 2002 and 2003 that strongly suggested Saddam Hussein already had or was acquiring an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Howell Raines was then the executive editor of The Times, and several articles about weapons of mass destruction were displayed prominently in the paper. Many of those articles turned out to be inaccurate.

By the spring of 2003, the newsroom was overwhelmed by the Jayson Blair fiasco, and Mr. Raines and the managing editor, Gerald Boyd, left the paper. When Bill Keller became executive editor on July 30, 2003, he focused on dealing with the trauma of the Blair scandal. Nevertheless, with questions growing about weapons in Iraq, he told Ms. Miller she could no longer cover those issues. But it took until May 2004 - more than a year after the war started and about a year after it became clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - before The Times acknowledged in an editors' note that the coverage was flawed. Mr. Keller then directed her to stay away from all national security issues.

Mr. Keller acknowledged to me last week that his tendency to act slowly in response to criticisms about prewar coverage might have contributed to the dismay among readers and in the newsroom with the way The Times dealt with protecting Ms. Miller's confidential sources in the leak investigation.

"By waiting a year to own up to our mistakes," Mr. Keller wrote Wednesday in response to questions I had asked, "I allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, I fear I fostered an impression that The Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers. If I had lanced the W.M.D. boil earlier, I suspect our critics - at least the honest ones - might have been less inclined to suspect that, THIS time, the paper was putting the defense of the reporter above the duty to its readers."

Mr. Keller is right. The paper should have addressed the problems of the coverage sooner. It is the duty of the paper to be straight with its readers, and whatever the management reason was for not doing so, the readers didn't get a fair shake.

The most disturbing aspect of the Oct. 16 retrospective was its revelation of the journalistic shortcuts that Ms. Miller seems comfortable taking.

One ethical problem emerged when Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, asked Ms. Miller if she had pursued an article about Valerie Plame, the C.I.A. operative, or her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Ms. Miller said in an interview for the retrospective that she "made a strong recommendation to my editor" that a story be pursued. "I was told no."

But Jill Abramson, now a managing editor and the Washington bureau chief in 2003, would have known about such a request. Ms. Abramson, to whom Ms. Miller reported, strongly asserted to me that Ms. Miller never asked to pursue an article about the operative. Ms. Abramson said that she did not recall Ms. Miller ever mentioning the confidential conversations she had with I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, who appears to be in the middle of the leak investigation. When I asked her, Ms. Miller declined to identify the editor she dealt with.

If Ms. Abramson is to be believed, and I do believe her, this raises clear issues of trust and credibility. It also means that because Ms. Miller didn't let an editor know what she knew, Times readers were deprived of a potentially exclusive look into an apparent administration effort to undercut Mr. Wilson and other critics of the Iraq war.

The negotiation of an attribution for a conversation that Ms. Miller had with Mr. Libby is also bothersome. She mentioned in her first-person account last Sunday that, to get Mr. Libby to give her certain information about the Plame situation, she had agreed to identify him as "a former Hill staffer" rather than the usual "senior administration official." She went on: "I agreed to the new ground rules because I knew that Mr. Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill."

When I talked to Ms. Miller, she dismissed concern about her agreement. She intended to get the information confirmed elsewhere before using it, she said, and would never have allowed Mr. Libby to be identified in print that way.

ANOTHER troubling ethical issue that I haven't yet been able to nail down is whether Ms. Miller holds a government security clearance - something that could restrict her ability to share with editors the information she gathers. During the Iraq war, Ms. Miller said in her personal account, "The Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment 'embedded' with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons."

But a Times article Thursday reported that Ms. Miller had said what she had signed was a so-called nondisclosure form, with some modifications. She indicated that under the conditions set by the commander of the unit she accompanied in Iraq, she had been allowed to discuss her most secret reporting only with Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd.

The Times needs to review Ms. Miller's journalistic practices as soon as possible, especially because she disputes some accounts of her conduct that have come to light since the leak investigation began. Since Ms. Miller did the Plame-leak reporting, the paper has made a significant effort to be as upfront as possible with readers about anonymous sources. An update of the rules for the granting of anonymity in The Times's ethics guidelines by Allan M. Siegal, the standards editor, may also be a good idea.

The apparent deference to Ms. Miller by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, and top editors of The Times, going back several years, needs to be addressed more openly, especially in view of the ethics issues that have come to light.

The freedom Ms. Miller was given to shape the legal strategy may have stemmed in part from the failure of top editors to dig into the case earlier in the battle.

Last Sunday's article raised this issue: "This car had her hand on the wheel because she was the one at risk," Mr. Sulzberger said. When I asked him this week if the integrity of The Times and the First Amendment weren't also at risk, he stressed that his assertion had to be read in the proper context. He referred me to his comments in a separate interview with The Times, which weren't published: "There were other hands on the wheel as well. And obviously if we felt that the situation didn't warrant the kind of support we gave her, we would have interceded."

Mr. Sulzberger, inclined by instinct and Times tradition to protect any reporter's confidential sources, wasn't doing anything special in backing Ms. Miller on this journalistic principle. But in an interview for the retrospective last Sunday, Ms. Miller acknowledged Mr. Sulzberger's special support in this case. "He galvanized the editors, the senior editorial staff. ... He metaphorically and literally put his arm around me," she said.

Neither Mr. Keller nor the publisher had done much digging into Ms. Miller's contacts with any of her confidential sources about Ms. Plame before the subpoena arrived on Aug. 12, 2004. Neither had reviewed her notes, for instance. Mr. Keller also didn't look into whether Ms. Miller had proposed a story about the Plame leak to an editor.

"I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own," he wrote to me, adding later, "If I had known the details of Judy's engagement with Libby, I'd have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense."

What does the future hold for Ms. Miller? She told me Thursday that she hopes to return to the paper after taking some time off. Mr. Sulzberger offered this measured response: "She and I have acknowledged that there are new limits on what she can do next." It seems to me that whatever the limits put on her, the problems facing her inside and outside the newsroom will make it difficult for her to return to the paper as a reporter.

Publisher & Exec, Editor of NY Times Sanctioned Cover-Up
William E. Jackson Jr.
10.25.2005
COVER-UP: The Publisher and Executive Editor of The New York Times Sanctioned a Cover-up in a Criminal

It should now be painfully obvious that the top leadership of The New York Times sanctioned, and participated in, a scandalous--if not legally liable--cover-up in a federal criminal investigation into how the name of a CIA covert operative was divulged to the press as part of an act of revenge against a Bush Administration critic of the war in Iraq.

The Valerie Plame case traces back directly to an effort by the White House to rebut criticism of its abuse of intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

There is corruption at the highest levels of The New York Times. Irreparable damage has been done to the reputation of the most eminent newspaper in the world. The resignations of both Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., and Bill Keller, should be on the table--not to mention the reporter known as "Miss Run Amok." Both men have been engaging in what might be termed "limited, modified hangouts" as they shift from one foot to the other in offering explanations of their own conduct in regard to the license granted Judith Miller, and the role of the Times in the handling of the Plame story.

Imagine the consequences if it was reported (in the NYT) that the two top officers of a major American corporation had received information that one of its employees may have witnessed a felonious act involving national security and that the employee might possibly be involved in a conspiracy to obstruct justice so as to protect herself and a high government official whose name was known; that they coincidentally and tacitly cooperated with the White House to suppress the information on that employee's relationship with the top aide to the Vice President; that they knowingly instructed other employees to "cook the books" in writing (or not writing) reports on what transpired in that relationship; and that they hired high-priced legal talent to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court, so as to prevent the employee from appearing before a grand jury. You get the idea.

Uncle Barney

While critics have favorably noted public editor Byron Calame's belated effort to address "The Miller Mess" that had been before the Times for over a year, his column of October 23 came across as more of an attempt to be an arbitrating force within the paper--a curmudgeonly "Uncle Barney"--than as an independent critic and "readers representative." He had come to the game very late, after all!

He began his column: "THE good news is that the bad news didn't stop The New York Times from publishing a lengthy front-page article last Sunday about the issues facing Judith Miller and the paper, or from pushing Ms. Miller to give readers a first-person account of her grand jury testimony."

But, of course, the bad news DID stop the editors from publishing the article about some very serious lingering questions facing Miller and the paper--until October 16, 2005. That is NOT good news. And to suggest that Judy Miller gave readers a first-person account worthy of being considered reliable--after her lawyers vetted it and a friend co-wrote it--is not to be taken seriously.

Fundamentals

Calame seems satisfied that most of his fundamental concerns have been addressed. Well, how is this for an unaddressed FUNDAMENTAL question? Bill Keller and Arthur Sulzberger had been involved in what amounted to a COVER-UP of a provocateur's name (call Scooter Libby a "source" for a story that was never written by a reporter acting in an extra-reportorial activist role) that they knew to be a key suspect in the Valerie Plame case! That cover-up, incidentally, served to facilitate a White House strategy of non-cooperation.

Add that fundamental issue to another one: the deferential treatment of Ms. Miller by the top command. To Calame's credit, he edged up to the heart of the matter: "The apparent deference to Ms. Miller by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, and top editors of the Times, going back several years, needs to be addressed more openly..." Indeed, Miller has acknowledged Mr. Sulzberger's special support in this case: "He galvanized the editors, the senior editorial staff... He metaphorically and literally put his arm around me."

Why is it that--as Greg Mitchell in Editor&Publisher has pointed out--no one high up at the Times is calling outright for her to be fired? It is probable that Sulzberger and Keller have a real stake in not running her off the reservation because they fear a "memoir" that washes the dirty linen of The Times in public.The crisis at the New York Times IS about much more than Judy Miller. Perhaps the Miller/Times scandal will encourage the newspaper to think critically about itself in larger terms, that is, about maintaining less proximity to power in a national security state.
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William E. Jackson Jr. writes often for Editors & Publishers from Davidson, N.C. He served from 1974-77 as chief legislative assistant to the U.S. Senate majority whip.

'WSJ': Judy Miller Discussing 'NYT" Exit with Sulzberge
'WSJ': Judy Miller Discussing 'NYT" Exit with Sulzberger
By E&P Staff
Published: October 26, 2005 10:00 AM ET

Embattled New York Times reporter Judith Miller, now on leave from the newspaper, has begun discussing a severance package and leaving entirely, a lawyer familiar with the talks told the Wall Street Journal's Joe Hagan.

"The negotiations began with a face-to-face meeting Monday morning between Ms. Miller and the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., said the lawyer familiar with the situation," Hagan reported today. A spokeswoman for the New York Times declined to comment. Ms. Miller didn't return calls.

The discussion came on the heels of last weekend's criiticism of the reporter by Executive Editor Bill Keller and Public Editor Barney Calame. Miller then fired back at both.
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New York Times Reporter Miller Is in Talks Over Her Job Status
Move Follows Public Break With the Newspaper; Severance Package Discussed
By JOE HAGAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 26, 2005; Page B3

New York Times reporter Judith Miller has begun discussing her future employment options with the newspaper, including the possibility of a severance package, a lawyer familiar with the matter, said yesterday.

The discussion about her future comes several days after the public rupture of the relationship between the Times and Ms. Miller, a 28-year veteran of the paper. Both the editor and the publisher of the Times have expressed regret for their unequivocal support for Ms. Miller when she spent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the unmasking of a Central Intelligence Agency operative.

The negotiations began with a face-to-face meeting Monday morning between Ms. Miller and the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., said the lawyer familiar with the situation. A spokeswoman for the New York Times declined to comment. Ms. Miller didn't return calls.

Mr. Sulzberger and New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller both indicated they wished they had known more about the circumstances that led Ms. Miller to go to jail rather than reveal who told her the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. She later agreed to testify when one of her sources, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, gave her a personal waiver to do so.

Ms. Miller testified twice before a grand jury led by U.S. prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who is trying to find out if officials broke any laws in a possible quest to discredit former diplomat Joseph Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

Ms. Miller's attorney has said the reporter isn't a target of the investigation, but she could be called as a witness if Mr. Fitzgerald obtains indictments in the case. New York Times Co. has been paying Ms. Miller's legal bills, but it isn't clear whether they would continue to do so if she is no longer employed by the company.

The newspaper began to distance itself from the reporter last week after the particulars of Ms. Miller's relationship with Mr. Libby were revealed in a first-person account of her testimony and in an independently reported piece in the Times. Those articles suggested that Ms. Miller may have misled the paper about a previously undisclosed meeting with Mr. Libby, and that the paper was negligent in not asking Ms. Miller more questions about her involvement before advancing her cause.

Over the weekend, two columnists for the New York Times wrote pieces questioning whether Ms. Miller could continue working for the paper. Ms. Miller currently is on vacation. She was released from jail Sept. 29.

In 2002, Ms. Miller was among a team of 10 Times reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Middle East after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. She has since become a subject of controversy for her prewar reporting on Iraq's nuclear capabilities, which bolstered the Bush administration's case for an invasion.

Many of those reports, which relied in part on anonymous administration officials, turned out to be incorrect. The Times has since acknowledged flaws in the reporting and published a series of articles correcting the mistakes. Ms. Miller has said she may write a book about her recent experiences.

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113029079693179566.html

Sulzberger On Miller, Ethics at ONA Conference
Sulzberger On Miller, Ethics at ONA Conference
The New York Times Co. By Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
By Jay DeFoore
Published: October 28, 2005 12:57 PM ET
NEW YORK

New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. laid out the company's vision for restoring trust and ethics in journalism Friday at a speech before the Online News Association's annual convention in New York. Sulzberger, speaking at a time when his newspaper is yet again facing scrutiny over its reporting, also gamely took questions regarding the Judy Miller controversy from journalists in the audience.

After repeatedly stressing the need for journalistic organizations to restore credibility with trustworthy reporting, Robert Niles of the Online Journalism Review asked the publisher if the Times' failure to fire Judy Miller had affected its own credibility.

"There's no question there has been an effect on how people are viewing us because of this Judy Miller situation," Sulzberger said. "But the change now is that we are acknowledging it.

"The story is not over," Sulzberger said, referring to the CIA leak investigation in which Miller became "entangled" when she initially refused to testify about conversations with a confidential source who later turned out to be Scooter Libby. "This is going to be an evolving story, and there's no question the Times has suffered in reputation.

"But we need to get back to our journalistic roots. We are breaking news on this, we are getting ahead of the competition," Sulzberger added, referring to the paper's increased coverage of the leak investigation following Miller's grand jury testimony. "When your reporter is in jail, there are constraints, and now those constraints are off," he noted.

Asked what lessons the Times will take away from the Miller affair, Sulzberger said, "It is clear looking back that we were far too slow in correcting our Weapons of Mass Destruction coverage. But be clear, that was not Judy's failure alone. It was an institutional failure. We didn't address it quickly enough, and now we've owned up to that."

Sulzberger added that reporters should work to establish greater clarity with their sources before granting anonymity.

In a wide-ranging speech that focused largely on the challenges facing mainstream media organizations in the digital era, Sulzberger laid out a seven-point plan for meeting the demands of modern consumers while staying true to journalism's traditional values:

1) First and foremost, Sulzberger said news organizations must stay committed to reporting news that is "credible, valuable, and trustworthy."

2) Addressing the inherent conflict between the demand for immediate information and news organizations' ability to provide it, Sulzberger admitted, "Too often we respond to competition, and competitive pressure causes mistakes. The news media frequently loses its way when it attempts to compete in a marketplace of infinite ideas."

3) Audiences are no longer passive, so news organizations must involve them in the conversation. Owing largely to the explosion of blogging, Sulzberger said, "Our culture firmament is shifting, and we need to adopt and we need to do so quickly."

4) Journalism needs to better address the changing Internet community. Sulzberger said that The New York Times Co. strives to be a "convener of communities," adding that the company wants to create environments where like-minded users can engage with each other and exchange safe, thoughtful information.

5) Journalistic ethics must be upgraded. Speaking of journalistic fabricators Janet Cook, Stephen Glass, and "our own Jayson Blair," Sulzberger said too often journalists lose sight of their primary responsibility, which is simply "to tell the truth."

6) Strong, ethical values should be adopted across all media. Speaking of the Internet and the blogosphere, which he referred to as an "immense group of writers who adhere to a wide range of standards," Sulzberger said, "Fairness and accuracy separates the best of mainstream media from bloggers."

7) News organizations have to attract a new generation of audience. Sulzberger said that "may well be our most important goal over the next decade. We have to find a way to get young people involved in their community and thinking about larger issues." The idea being, if young people become more civic-minded, they'll come to place a greater value on accurate, credible sources of news.

Sulzberger stressed that his main goal with the recent launch of TimesSelect, the paper's first major online subscription offering, was to move toward building an online business model that can sustain the Times' 1,200 journalists and $200 million budget. "We have to build into our Web thinking revenue potential to sustain quality journalism," he said. "If we don't build in some kind of equivalent of our circulation revenue, we're going to find ourselves in one hell of a tough place."

A final question, and one no doubt on many minds at the convention, asked Sulzberger whether the increasingly powerful Google is a "friend or foe" of mainstream media organizations. While Sulzberger admitted that the search giant is a "huge partner" with The New York Times and especially About.com, he noted that the company's latest forays into advertising and possibly classifieds shows that it is simply "going to go with the market leads them. And I don't blame them for that. … We have to get there before others do, and shame on us if we don't."
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Jay DeFoore ([email protected]) is E&P's Online Editor.

Links referenced within this article

Online Journalism Review
http://www.ojr.org
[email protected]
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/mailto:[email protected]

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'NY Times' Backs Miller Again in Editorial
'NY Times' Backs Miller Again in Editorial
By E&P Staff
Published: October 29, 2005 8:30 AM ET
NEW YORK

Criticized by many for standing so belligerently behind Judith Miller in her legal tangle, and then failing to comment on the current Miller controversy at the paper, The New York Times editorial page finally returned to defend the embattled reporter today.

But in a news article, the paper observed that the federal prosecutor seemed to believe that Miller's refusal to testify last year delayed yesterday's results by up to a full year, going back to before the 2004 election. "Instead, Ms. Miller fought the case, appealing it all the way to the United States Supreme Court," wrote Katharine Seelye and Adam Liptak.

In its editorial analyzing the indictments of "Scooter" Libby returned yesterday by a federal grand jury, the Times reiterated its backing for Miller's original decision in refusing to testify, and said it had "no reservations" about backing her in jail, while noting that perhaps her struggle could have been handled somewhat differently:

"Journalists from some news organizations testified after trying to fight the subpoenas; others testified on the basis of a document White House officials were compelled to sign that said they waived any promises of confidentiality from reporters. Ms. Miller says she believed the waiver was coerced, and she went to jail until Mr. Libby assured her directly that he was freeing her from her promise.

"While she was imprisoned for 85 days, this newspaper and this page gave Ms. Miller unwavering support. Recently, Times executives have expressed regrets about some of the ways her case was handled. Reflecting on these events, we have no reservations about the obligation of this paper to stand behind our reporter while she was in jail. We also think Ms. Miller was right on the central point, that the original blanket White House waiver was coerced."

Miller's colleague at the Times, columnist Maureen Dowd, who recently dubbed her the "Woman of Mass Destruction," today seemed to take another swipe at her, writing: "There is something grotesque about Scooter's hiding behind the press with his little conspiracy, given that he's part of an administration that despises the press and tried to make its work almost impossible."

Fellow columnist John Tierney, however, suggested that the administration leaks about Plame were not deliberate, nothing but an "accident."

He said journalists will suffer: "Still, the biggest losers so far in this case -- aside, of course, from Scooter Libby - are journalists. We've spent our careers assuring sources that we'll protect them, but now they can see how our testimony led to one source's indictment. If there's a trial, reporters will have to publicly betray Libby's confidences - and probably endure assaults on their integrity and accuracy from Libby's lawyers."
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E&P Staff ([email protected])

Links referenced within this article

[email protected]
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Report: Miller, 'NY Times' Close in on Separation Agreement
Report: Miller, 'NY Times' Close in on Separation Agreement
The New York Times Co.
Judith Miller
By E&P Staff
Published: November 09, 2005 10:20 AM ET
NEW YORK

Judith Miller and her employer, The New York Times, are "closing in on a severance agreement," sources tell the New York Observer in this week's edition, out today.

The Observer's Gabriel Sherman also reveals that sources claim that Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., last week "floated a suggestion: What if Ms. Miller cut short her leave of absence and just came back to West 43rd Street sometime after the weekend? It was as if the wistful child of a collapsing marriage were suggesting a family picnic -- a chance for Dad and Mom to remember how their differences weren't always so irreconcilable. Maybe she could be some kind of editor?"

But the publisher's "trial balloon was swiftly shredded," Sherman writes, when Miller demanded to return to her reporting desk. Executive Editor Bill Keller reportedly now stands firmly against this, backed by the paper's "rank-and-file." Keller is part of the severance negotiations, according to Sherman.

Miller also continues to request a space in the paper to rebut her many in-house critics, Sherman writes.

One staffer told Sherman, harkening back to the Jayson Blair mess, that in the Miller case the Howell Raines "is Arthur, not Bill."

But Miller continues to take exception to the paper referring to her, at times, as a rogue reporter. She told Sherman, who visited her near her Sag Harbor, N.Y., home on Saturday, "Every story I did was approved by an editor." At the sit-down with Sherman she was accompanied by her black cockapoo, and Treo.

"Ms. Miller and her lawyers signaled that they were specifically displeased with -- and might consider legal action about -- Mr. Keller's use of the word 'entanglement' in his memo to describe Ms. Miller's connections with now-indicted Vice Presidential aide I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. In the light of long-circulating gossip about Ms. Miller's romantic life, that word choice led to widespread speculation and mockery," Sherman wrote.

Miller told Sherman: "Many people -- many other journalists -- assumed that there was an improper relationship. Many people assumed there was a sexual relationship, which is one reason I'm so insistent on that, on his clarifying [the word choice]. I'll be diplomatic, O.K.? I call it a correction. And at The New York Times, we call it a correction…. But I'll settle for a, quote, 'clarification.'"
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E&P Staff ([email protected])

Links referenced within this article

Sherman writes
http://www.nyobserver.com/pageone_offtherec.asp
[email protected]
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Report: Dissenting View on WMD Coverage at 'NY Times'
Report: Dissenting View on WMD Coverage at 'NY Times'
By E&P Staff
Published: November 23, 2005 10:45 AM ET
NEW YORK

A lengthy report by Gabriel Sherman in this week's New York Observer offers several revelations, and criticism from unnamed sources, concerning that crucial period at The New York Times in 2002 when the newspaper advanced flawed information about WMD in Iraq.

As the piece points out, Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., speaking on the Charley Rose Show this month, described this as the "overheated period that followed 9/11," adding, "I think it's fair to say that those stories would not have run in The New York Times today."

Much of the Sherman article looks at dissension within the Times, principally on the part of Washington reporter James Risen, at around the time Judith Miller was writing her badly mistaken pre-war articles about WMD starting in September 2002.

"Several current and former Times staffers recalled Mr. Risen's complaints about his time at the Washington bureau," Sherman writes. "His intelligence sources were telling him that Ms. Miller's sources were wrong about the presence of W.M.D. in Iraq. One person who was in the bureau at the time recalled that Mr. Risen said that his intelligence sources were saying the administration's W.M.D. intelligence was 'political.'

"Two of the sources recalled Mr. Risen saying his efforts to get the bureau to question the paper's W.M.D. reports were rebuffed. The same two recall Mr. Risen complaining that he was having trouble getting his more skeptical line of reporting onto the page."

Sherman adds: "When The Observer called to check out the story, Mr. Risen said accounts of his frustrations were 'inaccurate' and offered no further comment." But Risen did write several articles for the paper that took issue with some of Miller's information. As E&P has noted, these stories tended to appear inside the paper while Miller's ran on Page One.

The article can be found online at www.observer.com/media_offtherecord.asp.

The Observer also features a cover story this week looking at the overall state of media coverage of Iraq, entitled "While We Were Sleeping." It notes cutbacks at Baghdad bureaus and restrictions on reporters and photographers among other reasons the war is not getting as much coverage as it deserves.
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E&P Staff ([email protected])

A Tough Look at Sulzberger, the 'NYT' and the Miller Affair
A Tough Look at Sulzberger, the 'NYT' and the Miller Affair
By E&P Staff
Published: December 11, 2005 8:40 PM ET
NEW YORK

In June 2002, media reporter Ken Auletta wrote a lengthy and much-talked-about piece about Howell Raines' New York Times for The New Yorker, and now this week he does the same for Bill Keller's New York Times. This time Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. gets star billing in a piece called "The Inheritance," with a subhed asking if he can "save the Times--and himself?"

The latest from Auletta, unfortunately for the Times, comes in the wake of the Judith Miller affair and declining stock values.

So we get revelations such as: Miller's defense attorney, Bob Bennett, "was astonished that Keller and Sulzberger had not inspected" her now-famous reporters' notebook which she took to her most critical discussion with Scooter Libby, until long after they had fully embraced her legal defense.

And Auletta gets to comment on Sulzberger that while he is passionate about journalism his enthusiasm "sometimes strikes people as immature or sarcastic....One often hears it said that Sulzberger lacks sufficient gravitas for a man in his position, which is perhaps another way of saying that he is still more a prince than a mature king."

Gay Talese, who wrote the history of the Times, "The Kingdom and the Power," tells Auletta, "You get a bad king every once in awhile." Auletta brings up his nicknames ("Pinch" and "Young Arthur") and cites his penchant for making goofy or inappropriate jokes.

Then he notes that Sulzberger, like Tom Hanks in the movie "Big," seems to be "only impersonating an older man." And an old friend says: "He's not a very nuanced person."

Auletta also quotes an unnamed Times Co. executive claiming that while he respects Sulzberger's committment to journalism he is no more than a "figurehead" on the business end.

But Keller doesn't come off so great either. He admits to Auletta that he first felt doubts about the Miller case in the fall of 2004 when the Washington Post and its tough reporter Walter Pincus didn't seem that concerned about cooperating somewhat with the prosecutor in the Plame case. "But I breezed past it," he explains lamely.

A second pause came after the Court of Appeals ruled against his paper in this case. Keller considered changing course, and wishes he had, but never made an attempt because--"An object in motion tends to stay in motion."

Another highlight of the Auletta piece is the fanning of a feud between Bill Keller and Howell Raines.

Keller notes that besides bequeathing him Miller, Raines passed along a lot of other trouble by calling the Times newsroom fat and complacent, allegedly in a bid to, first, beat him out for the top slot at the paper; and then to curry favor with the business side. He accuses Raines of doing it in a "cynical" fashion...."I don't think he really believed it." He adds that Raines campaigned for the editorship "with the political skills we admire in Karl Rove."

Raines hits back, saying that Keller "knows that the cynicism, if any, ran the other way" and that the previous editor Joe Lelyveld only made the Raines-as-friend-of-business argument to boost his candidate for a successor--Keller. He also notes that many media critics have wondered if Keller will ever disclose which editors were involved in assigning or editing her stories.

Auletta then relates that while Keller has wide respect in the newsroom, some people view him as "aloof and, at times, given to strange jokes."

Now, some of the Miller highlights. It should be noted that Auletta (as he mentions himself) is married to Amanda "Binky" Urban, the literary agent for Miller and Keller.

--Even while treating her like a First Amendment martyr while in jail, Keller and Sulzberger and other execs had already decided that Miller's writing career at the Times "was over." When she got out of jail, Sulzberger gave her what she took to be a treasured Times medallion, reserved for the great, but the publisher now refers to it as a "trinket," according to Auletta.

--Miller tells Auletta that she should have left the paper much earlier when she saw support for her WMD reporting slip, and says of Sulzberger near the end of her tenure, "He was there solidly -- until he wasn't." She refers to "the Times' betrayal of me."

-- Her attorney, Bennett, blames Suzlberger for being "gung-ho" and "pushing Judy" to takes a stand. But one of her other lawyers, Floyd Abrams, calls her "a very active client."

--Speaking with Auletta, Miller again admits she got WMD wrong, but again blames her sources -- not her possibly gullible or partisan nature. "I don't know what the list of alleged journalistic shortcomings are," she says, "because the ones the Times listed have now all been shown to have been bogus, or the result of spite--envy--by former colleagues."

--Auletta resurrects the argument that perhaps Raines let Miller run amok on WMD to prove to critics that he wasn't so liberal after all, and he could get behind some Iraq bashing as a prelude to war. Raines, who has remained silent on the latest twists in the Miller case, despite did e-mail Auletta: "It was well known throughout the paper that I believed the Times needed to improve its journalism and its business practices." He added that it still needs to do that, "witness the declining stock price."

--Sulzberger didn't know about Maureen Dowd's killer "Woman of Mass Destruction" column until after it ran.

There's one more thread in the article: fear about the financial future. A senior Times corporate executive worries that "it's just a matter of time until we start losing money." Jennifer Steinhauer, the metro reporter, refers to the Guild health-care fund going "belly up last year" and "stock options are under water."

The complete Auletta article:
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/051219fa_fact