behind the news

Haven’t We Seen This Before?

October 18, 2005

On last night’s somewhat lackluster edition of PBS’s “News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” Lehrer discussed with guest Alex Jones what the New York Times might do now that the Judith Miller mess has weakened its image. Jones, himself a former Timesman who is now director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, thought that an investigation would be the best way to go:

[I]f I were the editors of the New York Times, I would appoint an internal group that I had complete confidence in to review Judy Miller’s reporting, her journalism.

And I would expect her and ask her and insist upon her cooperating and engaging that. And if she refused to engage it, if she refused to be frank, then that would essentially be a firing offense as far as I’m concerned. I think Judy Miller needs this just as much as the New York Times does. I mean, her credibility is at stake. And I think that she needs either a clean bill or she needs not to be representing the New York Times anymore.

Well, sure, but haven’t we already traveled down this road with the Times — twice? Back in May, 2004, the Grey Lady reported the findings of an internal review (tucked back on page A10) that looked at the paper’s flawed prewar coverage of Iraqi exile (and Bush administration) claims that Saddam Hussein possessed the ability to manufacture chemical weapons. While the Times “found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been,” it was no one person’s fault — or so the paper claimed. “The problematic articles,” the paper continued, “varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature.”

Yeah, Judith Miller, right?

Well, not according to the Times. The common feature, apparently, was that they relied on the word of “a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on “regime change” in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate.”

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At the time the Editor’s Note was printed, many were already blaming Miller for having acted as little more than a stenographer for administration officials and Iraqi exiles with little to no credibility. But in the note, the Times tried to head off such speculation: “Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.”

This explanation — don’t blame Judy, blame her scoop-happy editors — was plausible, if not entirely convincing, given what we knew at the time. But in studying the paper’s second accounting of Miller’s WMD work, which appeared Sunday, we learn that declaration — that “editors at several levels” were as responsible for Miller’s gullible work as she was — was little more than a cop-out.

Back in 2004, Slate‘s Jack Shafer predicted critics would likely find the Editor’s Note “insufficient because it doesn’t crucify Judith Miller, a frequent target of this column, or any other Times reporter by name. But the last time I checked, the Times had yet to distribute pressroom keys to Miller, giving her power to print whatever excites her fancy. Editors aided and abetted every one of the flawed stories.”

But oh, how much we’ve learned since then. As Sunday’s Times tells it, the paper did everything but give Miller a set of pressroom keys. In its newest mea culpa, the paper reported that “Ms. Miller operated with a degree of autonomy rare at the Times,” and that once, when speaking to her editor Douglas Frantz, called herself “Miss Run Amok,” explaining that “I can do whatever I want.”

Evidence of this is that of the 15 stories cited by the Times in its 2004 note, Miller has stand-alone bylines on six, and shared a byline on another four. That’s two-thirds of the stories the paper conceded were mistaken about Iraq’s chemical and nuclear weapons programs bearing Miller’s fingerprints.

So, forgive us if when Alex Jones calls for a review of Miller’s work and demands that she participate, we scoff. The Times has already reviewed both her work and her work methods twice in the past two years. The first time her work product was found sorely lacking. The second time, she, by and large, refused to assist her fellow reporters in putting together their reconstruction of the story of Judy Miller.

Both times, the real victims of Miller’s stunningly blinkered reporting and refusal to play well with others were the readers of the New York Times. And that’s the most important thing the managers at the Times need to take into account as they ponder how to proceed.

–Paul McLeary

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.