So we’ve noticed that former New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been writing occasionally at The Daily Beast on foreign affairs. Last week, she reported on how some Obama advisors worry that Afghanistan “may be as much of a quagmire as Iraq”; in December, she wrote about the tortuous Israel/Gaza peace process.
Miller enjoyed a long and decorated career at the Times. But she left the paper in 2005, partially due to the controversy surrounding her discredited and inaccurate reporting on Iraq’s pre-war WMD program—reporting that was cited by Bush administration officials in their effort to sell the American public on the Iraq war.
Nowhere does The Daily Beast mention the circumstances that led to Miller’s departure. As a reader put it in an e-mail to CJR, “having Miller write on these things and not acknowledging her failure on Iraq is like seeing a surgeon who won’t tell you he killed his last dozen patients.”
Maybe Miller deserves a scarlet letter. Maybe that’s justice. But maybe that’s just vindictiveness, too. Acknowledging both her long and distinguished career and her colossally bad WMD reporting, does Judith Miller deserve this second chance? And, if so, to what extent should The Daily Beast acknowledge her past mistakes?
To me, it's not as much about what Judy Miller deserves; it's about what readers deserve. And if you use the what's best for readers metric...then, yeah, I think readers are served by Miller's Daily Beast renaissance. That's not to excuse her prior failings. But it is to say that Miller's decades of knowledge and experience--the same knowledge and experience that moved her relatively swiftly up the Times's editorial ladder, that won her a Pulitzer, etc.--weren't simply wiped away by her WMD reporting. One screw-up--even, yes, a colossal one with dire ramifications--doesn't negate everything else in a long career. And we're talking about a reporter with a great deal of expertise about the Muslim world, in particular, an area in whose general coverage we can use all the smart, well-informed, tenacious journalists we can get. Bottom line: as a reader and a news consumer, I want to benefit from Miller's knowledge and perspective. Or, at least, to have the option of doing so.
However--and it's a big "however"--any media organization that uses Miller's work has a responsibility to inform its audience--in big, bold, clear letters--of her background. Not just the sunshine!/lollipops!/Pulitzer! stuff, but also, more importantly, the mouthpiece of the Bush administration aspect of Miller's career. From what I've seen, none of the major outlets in which Miller has made appearances since her "retirement" from the Times in 2005--not the The Wall Street Journal (which occasionally runs opinion pieces of Miller's), not Fox News (which hired her as a contributor in October), not The Daily Beast--has mentioned any of that. Which is not only dishonest; it also does a real disservice to readers. Audiences deserve to know what Miller has accomplished, for good and for ill, in her career, so that they can place her assertions and analyses in their proper, caveat emptor context. And so that, if they decide to avail themselves of Miller's take on current events, they can determine for themselves the size of the grain of salt they'll take with it.
#1 Posted by Megan Garber, CJR on Wed 28 Jan 2009 at 09:13 AM
I agree with Megan that the only real issue here is the Daily Beast's failure to introduce Miller to its readers with an Editor's Note explaining her past missteps. If Miller had been brought on to write about, say, sustainable agriculture or movie reviews, no such introduction would have been necessary. But of course Miller should be allowed to continue her career as a journalist. Her reporting on WMD in Iraq was deeply flawed, but much of the coverage in the run-up to war in Iraq was deeply flawed, as has been widely acknowledged. If everyone who got Iraq wrong were to be drubbed out of journalism, we would lose a lot of excellent journalists.
#2 Posted by Brent Cunningham, CJR on Wed 28 Jan 2009 at 10:52 AM
I think if the Daily Beast wants to use Judith Miller's voice and experience, it by all means should. And I agree with Megan that somehow, the Daily Beast should make clear what (or whom) it is offering its readers. I wouldn't mind, though, if that clarification took a more diplomatic cast; and I don't think that branding her with a scarlet letter is particularly productive. Here's Miller's bio from the DB site:
"Judith Miller is an author and a Pulitzer Prize-winning former investigative reporter for The New York Times. She is now an adjunct fellow at Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor to its magazine, City Journal, and a Fox News commentator."
Should there be an asterisk after "for The New York Times" that informs us of her past grievances? Writer bios are almost always crafted or submitted (or at least approved) by the writers themselves (in whatever nonchalant, glossy or non-glossy ways they prefer readers to see them), and it doesn't seem particularly fair for the editorial Hand of God to come down and tweak Miller's bio as a special case.
There's something a bit hazy about installing Miller as a contributor without so much as a word of context. But I'd most prefer it if the explanation were to come from an editorial note (or the DB's version of a public editor) welcoming Miller, addressing reader concerns, and essentially explaining their reasons for giving her a journalistic platform -- a "yes, she screwed up but here's what we think she can offer readers exclusive of that screw-up" kind of thing.
Changing her bio to acknowledge her past doesn't really make sense to me. Should her one-line bio (after a WSJ column, running across the crawl at the bottom of a FOX News broadcast) forever require such warning! warning! verbiage? That really would be a scarlet A, and I think an unfair one.
#3 Posted by Jane Kim, CJR on Wed 28 Jan 2009 at 12:01 PM
This may be off-topic, or it may be pertinent. I'm not sure. Either way, something in the rhetoric of Judith Miller's Afghanistan piece strikes me as odd, and I'm wondering whether you CJR folks, as regular and skilled writers of analysis, can shed a little light.
The nut graf, it seems to me, is the third, in which Miller offers anonymous quotations about whispers and quagmires. The very next paragraph she introduces the CIA veteran Bruce Riedel and refers to another unnamed source to claim not only he's generally influential but that his particular opinions on policy are also weighty relative to those of other advisers. "He's emerged as a key adviser," Miller writes. (An aside: "key" as an adjective makes me clench my teeth and suppress tears. Where's Merrill Perlman?!) There are no statements made about Afghanistan in this graf.
The next time we hear about Riedel, it's in the eleventh graf and moving to the twelfth, after we've heard about David Patraeus again and are introduced to Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Richard Holbrooke, and a handful of reluctant Europeans. Then, despite the (late?) allowance that Riedel might not even be a part of the administration (it's "still unclear" whether he'll "accept" a post), Miller offers that Riedel advocates both "a tougher approach" and a stronger central Pakistani government. That seems to bear corroboration, but Miller moves on to how Riedel was, in the past, correct about a "regional approach" to Afghanistan (note the parallelism between the two "approaches"). Miller then offers corroboration of this fact, pointing to an unspecified Pentagon study in 2008.
Miller then moves right along to Sen. Jack Reed, and we could be forgiven for thinking that Reed and Riedel are two birds of a diplomatic feather. Reed, about whom Miller drops another "influential," believes "corralling and stabilizing Pakistan"--two concepts that seem to map neatly onto Riedel's tougher appoach and strengthened civilian government. I'm perilously out of my pay grade here, but my suspicion is that there are few elected officials who would disagree with quite innocuous language like "corralling." What's more, the graf ends with one of the greatest throw-away lines ever: "This conflict is not one-dimensional." Seriously? Offering your reader that quotation from Reed strikes me as flagrant banality (HT Arendt).
Note well that I do not doubt the Riedel's accomplishments or question his competence or honesty. Given the fog around Miller's sources, I just don't get why he makes an appearance in this piece at all--much less rather prominently. Can anyone help?
#4 Posted by Josh Young, CJR on Wed 28 Jan 2009 at 12:30 PM
An observation: I count seven anonymous sources or anonymously-sourced moments in Miller's most recent Daily Beast piece (including two with a variation on my favorite anonymous-source-ID: "According to those familiar with his thinking, Gen. Petraeus...")
While anonymous sourcing is not uncommon in reporting on the Pentagon, foreign policy, and the like, I don't think Beast readers are currently provided enough of Miller's bio to place all this, as Megan put it, in its "proper caveat emptor context." I like Jane's idea of an editor's note or a public editor's official welcome/explanation.
Another observation: comments on Miller's most recent Beast article seem to run emphatically against the Beast giving her this platform.
#5 Posted by Liz Cox Barrett, CJR on Wed 28 Jan 2009 at 01:11 PM
There are two questions here:
Could a journalist ever make a mistake so egregious as to warrant being professionally blacklisted?
If so, did Miller make such a mistake in her Iraq WMD reporting?
#6 Posted by surlybastard, CJR on Wed 28 Jan 2009 at 04:27 PM
These commentators are true Christians --- perhaps to a fault.
I'm not so forgiving.
May I make 2 points:
l) Judy Miller has never apologized for her egregious NY Times Iraq reporting. So she's not being "rehabilitated" by Daily Beast --- she's unrepentant. And, as some commentators noted, she's no more careful now in her sourcing.
2) In her glory days, she wasn't such a stellar reporter when she didn't have a collaborator. Here's Chris Dickey, a first-class journalist, on Miller:
"Judith Miller takes good notes, but she doesn’t always know where they come from. That was one of the first lessons I learned about her when we were both based in Cairo 20 years ago, she for The New York Times and I for The Washington Post. As often happens in the field, we were competitors who spent a lot of time working with and against each other, in a friendly sort of way. And so it was that in August 1985 we wound up on the same trip to visit the front lines of a half-forgotten war in the Western Sahara.."
"For some reason none of us had a tape recorder, so on the flight back to Casablanca we compared our notes from the one interview we’d had with a Moroccan general a few hours before. We wanted to be sure the phrases we’d scribbled down were accurate. But there was a problem. Judy had many more quotes in her notebook than I and another reporter had in ours. And Judy’s were much better. Then I realized why. I’d done a lot more homework on that particular story than she did, and I was asking much more detailed questions. She’d written them down, and now she thought they came from the general, but many of the quotes actually were from … me."
"We all laughed, and I doubt that Judy ever made that mistake again, but it taught me something about her that I’ve seen confirmed several times in the years since. Judy’s great talent as a reporter is in gaining access. Full stop. She doesn’t always know what she has when she’s got it, and she isn’t always good at analyzing what she’s heard when she hears it. Indeed, that may be one reason so many very high level sources—kings, princes, dictators, presidents, politicians—have enjoyed confiding, through her, so many supposed scoops and secrets published in The New York Times."
#7 Posted by CarnegieHill, CJR on Thu 29 Jan 2009 at 02:21 PM
Come on. All Judith Miller did was help start a war that caused the deaths of more than 150,000 Iraqis and more than 4,000 American troops. Is that so bad? After all, she is a Pulitzer Prize winner. Everybody makes mistakes. Maybe she should just run a correction or clarification.
#8 Posted by DJP, CJR on Thu 29 Jan 2009 at 03:19 PM
@CarnegieHill: Thanks for the Dickey quote (and for readers interested in the sourcing, you can find the passage in question here).
And your--and his--point is well taken. While I'd respond that talent for access actually counts for quite a bit when you're talking about the reporting Miller did (and continues to do for The Daily Beast), it's also true that access is only part of the journalistic equation. Analysis is another. And if a reporter can't be trusted to assess and analyze situations accurately, no matter how well-sourced they are--then, you're right, that's a huge problem. Particularly since analysis is much murkier than straight reporting when it comes to basics like fact-checking, etc.
@DJP: I see your point, but I also think there's a distinction to be made here between reporting itself and the ramifications of that reporting. Miller's reporting when it came to the WMDs was certainly flawed--no one here is arguing otherwise--but can Miller herself fairly be blamed for how the Bush Administration used her Times reporting to make its case for war? Not really. Just as there are limits to Otto Hahn's accountability for Hiroshima, say--or to, you know, Al Gore's accountability for Internet snark--there are limits to Miller's accountability for the Iraq war.
To be clear, that's not to say Miller bears no responsibility here. She does. In her role at the Times, her editors and the public trusted her to convey accurate information--and she violated that trust. But her flawed reporting was only one piece of the puzzle that led to the American involvement in Iraq; to claim more--to say that the blood of the all those killed in that war is directly on her hands--is both too extreme and too glib, I think, to be helpful here.
#9 Posted by Megan Garber, CJR on Thu 29 Jan 2009 at 04:43 PM
No one can be stopped from "reporting" in the Web age. Each reader will make his or her own decision about Miller. Here's mine (free!): The Daily Beast is not a worthy or credible news source if it hires the likes of Miller. It won't end up in my bookmarks.
#10 Posted by John Parker, CJR on Thu 29 Jan 2009 at 07:19 PM
Why would The Daily Beast have to mention Judith Miller's shill-job for the Bush Administration, when no paper or TV outlet in America will openly apologize for its horrendous reporting on the Duke Lacrosse case? That was bias, jump-to-bad-conclusion mob reporting at its worst and yet, I haven't seen CNN or the New York Times apologize for their involvement in it. Why should the Daily Beast have to declare Judith Miller's history when no newspaper in America openly declares any of its rotten journalism and from experience, I can tell you there is a lot of rotten journalism every day.
#11 Posted by scott taylor, CJR on Thu 29 Jan 2009 at 09:47 PM
I'm all for disclosure, but I'm trying to imagine the tagline that you think ought to accompany Judith Miller's pieces: Judith Miller is a former reporter for the New York Times. She also sucks. I mean, come on. We all know who Miller is, and we can judge her work accordingly.
#12 Posted by Dan Kennedy, CJR on Sat 31 Jan 2009 at 01:27 PM
Miller followed current journalistic norms in anonymously quoting senior White House and Pentagon officials about their evidence that Iraq had WMD before the war. Her reporting did turn out to be colossally wrong, but only because her sources were.
Furthermore, when Dan Rather got a job helping teach journalism at a respected journalism program, where was the CJR article asking whether his reputation should be salvaged? Rather did some colossally bad reporting as well -- but we seem to hold him to a different standard.
#13 Posted by Matt J. Duffy, CJR on Mon 2 Feb 2009 at 07:45 AM
Judith Miller = Lies-lies-lies and deceit! Shame on the Daily Beast. I guess they figure any publicity via their roster of writers is better than none. I'll bet they aren't paying her a damn thing either.
#14 Posted by Curtis Trammell, CJR on Mon 2 Feb 2009 at 03:38 PM
If bad reporting and a journalist passing off poor sources is grounds for professional excommunication, why does Sy Hersh still have a job?
I cannot think of another journalist who has gotten so many stories wrong and relied on so many bad sources for his stories then Hersh. Using someone like Ari Ben-Menashe should have made him radioactive for the rest of his career, but he peddles the same bullshit over and over and it agrees with the "sensibilities" of his readers.
#15 Posted by Paul Difiglio, CJR on Tue 3 Feb 2009 at 09:07 AM
@Dan Kennedy: You make a good point--one I mostly agree with. But I'm not sure I agree with the idea that "we all know who Miller is, and we can judge her work accordingly." Sure, we in the media, who have followed her story in detail, know who she is; do average readers, though? For the benefit of those who don't, I think the DB has a responsibility to inform readers of Miller's background. Not in a warning! warning! author sucks! caveat in her bio...but somehow.
I think Jane's idea of having Miller's DB bio link to an editor's note about her hiring is a good one: it gives readers the option of learning more about Miller's journalistic background, and editors the ability to explain the logic that went into hiring Miller. Assuming that logic had more to do with journalism than PR, that is...
#16 Posted by Megan Garber, CJR on Tue 3 Feb 2009 at 11:31 AM