Take a stroll down memory lane, back to this immortal dialogue from the Watergate tapes of a March 1973 meeting in the Oval Office:
PRESIDENT: You think, you think we want to, want to go this route now? And the — let it hang out, so to speak?
DEAN: Well, it’s, it isn’t really that —
HALDEMAN: It’s a limited hang out.
DEAN: It’s a limited hang out.
EHRLICHMAN: It’s a modified limited hang out.
Those words came to mind this morning as we digested the long-awaited and mammoth New York Times‘ mea culpa on the Judy Miller affair, to which the newspaper devotes more than two open pages.
As we read along, several facts leaped off the page at us.
* Even though the contempt citation against her has been lifted, and even though her grand jury testimony is finished, Miller still isn’t coming clean with her colleagues. Or, as the newspaper put it in a somewhat buried lede (the 30th paragraph of its opus):
“In two interviews, Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.”
A few paragraphs down, we further learn that, queried by Times reporters, Miller “would not discuss her sources,” other than Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff.
* Miller testified to a grand jury last week that she can no longer remember the name of the source who fed her the name of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame — one of the sources that she presumably went to jail to protect. (Additionally, the Times‘ piece reveals that she languished in jail for 85 days because of a colossal misunderstanding between her lawyers, Floyd Abrams and Bob Bennett, and Libby’s lawyer, James Tate.)
* Miller was a renegade reporter, much of the time answering to no one in particular, and pursuing whatever she wished. Shortly after Doug Frantz, now managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, was appointed investigative editor of the New York Times in 2003, Miller introduced herself to him as “Miss Run Amok.” Frantz asked, “What does that mean?” Miller replied, “I can do whatever I want.”
As if confirming that thesis, the Times piece tells us that once executive editor Bill Keller was appointed the head of the Times newsroom in July of 2003, one of his first moves was to tell Miller she could no longer cover Iraq or weapons issues. In spite of that, Keller acknowledges in retrospect, “she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm.”
* While Keller and publisher Arthur Sulzberger were rallying around Miller as a First Amendment hero, inside the Times reporters were doing what reporters are supposed to do — trying to find out what the hell was going on. As the Times put it today, “reporters at the paper spent weeks trying to learn the identity of Ms. Miller’s source. All the while, Mr. Keller knew it, but declined to tell his own reporters. Even after reporters learned it from outside sources, the Times did not publish Mr. Libby’s name, though other news organizations already had.”
Todd Purdum, one of the Times‘ finest reporters, put it this way: “[M]ost people I talk to have been troubled and puzzled by Judy’s ability to operate outside of conventional reportorial channels and managerial controls. Partly because of that, many people have wondered about whether this was the proper fight to fight.”
* The paralysis that afflicted the editors and reporters of the Times as the case unfolded over the months was even more debilitating than had been imagined by those of us scrutinizing the Tower of Truth on 43rd Street from afar.
Time and again, talented reporters such as Douglas Jehl, David Johnston and Richard Stevenson were waved off the Miller story by Keller, himself fresh from meetings of Times executives who were planning the paper’s own legal strategy and trying to coordinate it with Miller’s. As Times Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman put it, “No editor wants to be put in the position of keeping information out of the newspaper.” (Emphasis added.)
But some were put in that position, including Keller and managing editor Jill Abramson, and as a consequence, the Sunday piece notes, the Times “limited its own ability to cover aspects of one of the biggest scandals of the day. Even as the paper asked for the public’s support [in defending Miller], it was unable to answer its questions.”
* The deep discontent in the Times newsroom over Miller’s freewheeling ways extended back to Miller’s flawed and gullible coverage of the WMD issue in the months leading up to the war in Iraq. “I told her there was unease, discomfort, unhappiness over some of the coverage,” said Roger Cohen, at the time the newspaper’s foreign editor.
But that was nothing compared to the “unease, discomfort, unhappiness” that Miller’s legal strategy and the newspaper’s accompanying silence created in the newsroom over this past summer. Indeed, when she returned to the newsroom four days after getting out of jail, Miller was less than eager to face her colleagues. Claudia Payne, a Times editor and close friend of Miller, was summoned to come down to the lobby and escort Miller to the newsroom. “She very felt frightened,” Payne said. “She felt very vulnerable.”
It all makes for a rich, if uneven, read, and as Jay Rosen, an NYU professor of journalism, has written on his blog, Press Think, while the piece is grievously compromised by Miller’s non-cooperation, the Times must be commended for a valiant effort:
“I give credit to the Times for running the story a few days after they felt the legal clearances were had, for giving readers a look inside at decision-making normally hidden, for airing uncomfortable facts — including internal tensions — and for explaining what happened as well as the editors felt they could. This was a very difficult piece of journalism to do. As language in conveyance of fact, it is superbly edited.”
All that is true. But what finally got lost at the Times was the most elementary fundamental of the trade. As blogger Glenn Reynolds (InstaPundit) put it on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” some days ago, “I think journalists should tell people what they know. And I think that should be sort of the touchstone. And departures from that should be very rare.”
And this one was the departure of all departures.
Managing editor Jill Abramson said it best. Asked by the reporters working on the Sunday saga what she regretted about the Times‘ handling of the matter, Abramson replied:
“The entire thing.”
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.