the story that ran away with the reporter

PS -- Today (Oct. 15) the Times is finally running their explanation of the Judith Miller affair. It is wretched. It is written in the kind of restrained tone that is usually adopted at the dinner table after a fight with your spouse. It threads among the upsetting topics, and doesn't once mention the topic that has been discussed over and over again on the Net -- whether Miller wasn't using her position as a reporter to fight against Wilson. So: no mention of the report that Miller, in the newsroom, was telling people that Wilson was a liar. Surely if that was being said, the crackerjack NYT team that couldn't seem to pry a straight answer out of Ms. Miller could have asked about it. Instead, the NYT team simply preserved the pretence that this was wholly about a reporter doing her job -- although admitting that in this instance, the reporter was, actually, not doing her job. She wasn't reporting on Wilson, and she had information that she wasn't sharing with anybody in the Washington Bureau who was.

Until the NYT faces up to the accusation that Judy Miller was all about pumping and dumping a particular line from a D.C. cabal, it will not be able to disentangle itself from this tarbaby. The portrait of Judy Miller as Nancy Drew, ace reporter can't be maintained by NYT, but alternatives can't be explored, even gingerly.


I meant to write a companion post to yesterday’s. This will take a little longer to compose than I was planning on. Sorry.

Instead, I’ll write about something fashionable: Fitzgerald’s investigation of one of the shapes of the conspiracy that took us into the Iraq war.

It will be one of the ironies, looking back at this, that at the very time Judith Miller’s testimony proved to be highly inconvenient to the notion that she was doing anything compatible with conveying true, or at least probable, information to the citizenry, she is being given a first amendment prize. One of the media claims about its business is that it needs access to sources who are sometimes unwilling to be named in order to fulfill its function. This makes sense to me. But nested in that claim is a dimension that is as important to the designs of the governing class: that class needs the authentication provided by the news to fulfill its task of planning. The convergence of these needs in the run up to the Iraq war produced a pumping mechanism that was formally identical to the mechanism that swelled the bubble market in 1999 – the newspapers would take info from sources allied to a particular viewpoint, and then spokesmen for that particular viewpoint would quote the newspapers. Miller’s reporting made it possible for the pro-war Bush administration to pretty much quote itself to justify its claims. Instead of Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb by citing Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb, how much more convenient to have a story in a supposedly liberal paper built upon an unnamed source ultimately from Cheney’s office tell us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb. This cozy relationship was threatened by Wilson – or the players in it felt themselves to be. In truth, the over-reaction to Wilson is what makes this reminiscent of Watergate: Nixon pretty much approved on a course of skullduggery that was completely unnecessary, given that he was crushing his opponent in the polls.

There was an interesting post on Jay Rosen’s blog about the decline of the NYT. I think Rosen is right: the NYT has been a surprisingly drab paper during the Bush years. This isn’t a matter of ideology – the WP is to the right of the NYT, and supported the insanity of the Iraq adventure with all the hardon fervor of a deacon on the front pew. But the Washington Post has been much more open to disagreement, and much more noticing of disagreement, which has made it a more interesting paper. And it seems more on top of things, with a journalistic crew that is riskier and livelier. Compare, for instance, Dana Milbank and Elizabeth Bumiller, and you'll see what I'm talking about. The liveliest part of the NYT has become its op ed page. That’s rather ridiculous.

Joan Didion, in an essay on Woodward, wrote that reporters generally have a sense of who is ‘running a story.” Any one national story is usually run by a handful of reporters, with the rest coming after them. Obviously, Miller was one of those running the story in the pre-war buildup. Just as obviously, running this story meant running counterfeits, innuendos, misleading analyses, and all of the rest of it. In this case, the story ran Miller. And it is now running the NYT into a cul de sac, in which Miller’s increasingly bizarre testimony (her strange discovery of notes has a very Nixonian overtone), her possible lies before the grand jury, raise the question of the degree of consciousness of the NYT presidium in allowing itself to become the instrument of a foreign policy Ponzi scheme.

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Harry has come up with the prototype Limited Inc products that we are soon going to be giving out to charitable readers. And that means that we are soon going to insert smarmy please send LI money messages in every post. Like this one. We’ll be posting pics of the shirt and (on Harry’s suggestion) the tote bag soon.