behind the news

On 43rd Street, a Strange Silence Grows Louder

October 3, 2005

Like Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post‘s media reporter, we were astonished and disappointed to pick up, first, Sunday’s New York Times, and then Monday’s, only to find no mention whatsoever in the news columns of the ever-weirder Scooter & Judy Show. That would be the bizarre relationship between Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Cheney, and Judith Miller, the Times reporter who languished in jail for 12 weeks before walking out last Thursday and testifying before Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury the next morning.

Kurtz put it this way on “Reliable Sources,” the Sunday program on the press that he hosts for CNN:

“I was hoping I would wake up this morning and see in my New York Times and read a 5,000-word piece by Judith Miller telling us everything that was involved. She has no more legal liability here. Matt Cooper [of Time magazine] did it. No piece in the paper today.”

Andrea Mitchell of NBC, a guest on the show, chimed in: “Matt Cooper did that, and in fact I think that is something we do expect and would have wanted from Judy Miller. We want to hear her story. I’m not quite sure why we’re not hearing her story.”

Neither are we.

This is the biggest press story of the moment — perhaps of the year — and the fact that not just Miller but also Times executive editor Bill Keller, publisher Arthur Sulzberger and the Times as an institution are all remaining mum about it in the face of widespread curiosity does not speak well for a newspaper that supposedly exists to serve its readership, not just its own self-interest.

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William Jackson put it this way last week in Editor & Publisher:

“Has the Times opted out of covering all issues related to the role of Judith Miller in the Plame investigation, the most prominent case involving the press and national security to come along in years? And, if this is true, should not the newspaper explain that decision to its readers, or at least be put on the spot by its public editor?”

Jackson made a similar observation in the Huffington Post last month: “It is as if the top leaders of the Times have pulled up the gates and are separated by a moat from the outside world and any legal accountability for the actions of Miller, let alone any responsibility to readers on the story” — and it seems more germane than ever now.

As it was, there was no mention of the case in the massive Sunday edition of the Times — entire forests are cut down to print this thing — although the previous day there had been a chest-pounding editorial sounding the old trumpet that “Reporters are not given the luxury of choosing the circumstances under which they take a stand on their right to guarantee confidentiality to their sources.”

In fact, once Miller received a letter from Libby re-emphasizing that he had, months earlier, given her a waiver from “protecting” him as a source, she did exactly that — decided that “the circumstances” no longer required her to take a stand to protect a source, whereupon she walked and talked.

This case has tied the New York Times in knots, entangling not just Miller but also Keller and Sulzberger, both of whom originally crawled out on that creaky limb of absolutism with her — and both of whom dutifully hopped off the limb as soon as she did.

Worse, it has also apparently gagged and handcuffed an entire staff of 1,200 reporters and editors — many of the best of them being Miller’s colleagues in the Washington bureau — from reporting or writing in-depth about the story behind the story. And that is to no one’s credit. The Times should stop ignoring the elephant in the living room, roll up its sleeves, and produce something that goes beyond the rote stenography of carefully-scripted utterances from Miller, her lawyers and her employer.

We expect both spin and stonewalling from our government officials. We expect neither from the premier newspaper in the land.

Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.