Columbia Journalism Review - July/August 2003
Parallel Universe at the Times by Liza Featherstone
For much of the spring, The New York Times seemed to inhabit parallel universes on the matter of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, possibly the most important factual question of the year. In nearly a dozen stories by the senior writer Judith Miller, such weapons were just about to be found or had recently been destroyed. Yet Times editorials and stories on the subject by other reporters were careful not to suggest any such thing. Reached by email as she was on deadline - writing another story about weapons of mass destruction - Miller indignantly disputed such a description of her work. "Have you bothered to read what I filed?" she asked.
Well, yes. The file shows that every few days from late April through May, any Times reader interested in the WMD issue might be puzzled. For example:
* On April 21, Miller wrote a page-one piece about an "Iraqi scientist" who, according to her military sources, said that Saddam Hussein's government had destroyed biological and chemical weapons days before the war began. She had not been allowed to speak to him but was "permitted to see him from a distance," she wrote, as he pointed to spots in the sand where he said "chemical precursors and other weapons" material were buried. The story said that the American team claimed to have dug up such precursors based on the scientist's information, which members described as "the most important discovery to date" in the hunt for WMDs. Two days later, the Times editorial page, with no mention of Miller's findings, declared it "no small matter" that no weapons had "yet been found."
* On May 8, Miller quoted anonymous Bush administration officials as suggesting strongly that a tractor-trailer truck in Iraq had to be a biological weapons lab: "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it has to be a duck , " one said. The thrust of the story was that the lab was indeed a duck - a weapons lab. Three days later, William J. Broad, a science writer for the Times, reported that WMDs had not "yet come to light" No mention of the Miller scoop.
* Miller reported, on May 11, TRAILER IS A MOBILE LAB CAPABLE OF TURNING OUT BIOWEAPONS, A TEAM SAYS, with one source calling the finding a "smoking gun" in the weapons search. Two days later, a Times editorial acknowledged the government claim and thus, implicitly, Miller's reporting, but concluded that "the search for the, large stocks of chemical and biological weapons ... has yet to turn up anything significant. " The implication: Miller's scoop was not "significant.,
It became difficult for a reader to avoid concluding that the WMDs-in-Iraq issue had divided not only the United Nations but the Times. Indeed, a Times reporter who has worked in the region and who has asked not to be identified confirmed that people in the Iraq bureau were frustrated with Miller's stories, because she seemed to keep coming to "the same conclusions" even when there seemed to be "no evidence for them.' Miller, the reporter explained, reported not to the bureau, but to editors in New York. Meanwhile, according to a network TV journalist who covered the recent storm inside the Times, reporters who met with publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. specifically complained to him about Miller's WMD coverage. And the Washington Poses media reporter, Howard Kurtz, revealed - via a leaked e-mail exchange between Miller and the Times's Baghdad bureau chief, John Burns - that Miller, by her own admission, relied on Ahmad Chalabi, a controversial former exile, for "most of the front-page exclusives on WMD." Burns declined to comment for this story.
Assistant managing editor Andrew Rosenthal argues that "there is no contradiction" between Miller's reporting and the rest of the paper. Miller had been "embedded" with a U.S. weapons inspection team, he says, and was reporting on what members of that team were saying, not presenting their claims as fact. "When she was no longer embedded, she was able to develop different sources," says Rosenthal. (By late May, two stories that were more skeptical about WMDs in Iraq appeared under Miller's byline, along with that of Broad.) Embedding, Rosenthal says, is a tradeoff.
Indeed. On May 20, Miller gave the commencement speech at Barnard College, her alma mater. She urged the graduates to be skeptical about the given reasons for the war on Iraq, and particularly of government claims about WMDs. About embedding, she said that journalists "need to draw conclusions about whether journalistic objectivity was compromised ... whether the country's interests were best served by this arrangement."
Liza Featherstone is a journalist based in New York.