Off the Record by Tom Scocca
Habits of mind can be tough to break. Judith Miller, for instance, can still cling to an assertion in the face of contrary evidence.
"Who bothers to read New York anymore?" Ms. Miller asked on Tuesday afternoon.
The day before, New York magazine had posted the contents of its latest issue on the Web. And the likely answer, at the moment, would have been: Just about everybody. At least, just about everybody who knows Ms. Miller, or who holds any sort of opinion about her work at The New York Times.
In New York, Franklin Foer had presented a lengthy, much-anticipated and highly unflattering profile of Ms. Miller, the Pulitzer winner who reported extensively on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war-and who is now bearing the brunt of their absence.
It's been a tough stretch for Ms. Miller and her work. On May 20, police in Baghdad raided the home and offices of Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile who had long been the public face of opposition to Saddam Hussein. The same week, the U.S. cut off Mr. Chalabi's funding.
As a lobbyist against the old regime, Mr. Chalabi-and his organization, the Iraqi National Congress-had been a key source for Ms. Miller's scoops about Mr. Hussein's arsenal. The nameless sources who'd told Ms. Miller about bioterror labs, aluminum nuclear-centrifuge tubes and assorted other frightening details had been I.N.C. sources. And now the I.N.C. was on the skids.
Meanwhile, after months of reluctance, The Times had reversed course on Ms. Miller's work. On May 26, the paper ran an editor's note declaring that, having "studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype" in the run-up to war, it was "past time we turned the same light on ourselves." The note studiously avoided naming Ms. Miller, saying that the problems with prewar coverage were "more complicated" than any single reporter's alleged misdeeds. But it listed a series of flawed stories, mostly Ms. Miller's handiwork.
Four days later, public editor Daniel Okrent, who had previously ruled Ms. Miller's prewar reporting off-limits, took his own whack at the topic-and name Mr. Miller.
As if that weren't enough fodder for speculation-was it more damning or less for the editor's note to have avoided naming names?-the avenging, undead wraith of Howell Raines had entered the fracas.
In an e-mail to the Los Angeles Times, which he c.c.'d to the entire journalistic community via the Poynter Institute's Web site, Mr. Raines complained that the current editors had never asked him, the executive editor under whom many of the problem stories were written, for input into their note. But while he had the floor, Mr. Raines allowed that the blame should probably fall on an array of his subordinate editors-including, by lucky chance, the ones who'd succeeded him: now-executive editor Bill Keller and now-managing editor Jill Abramson.
"Ms. Abramson...supervised a significant amount of Ms. Miller's reporting and personally edited the resulting stories before they went into the paper," Mr. Raines noted.
Then came Mr. Foer, who painted Ms. Miller as an out-of-control shrew, guilty of crimes ranging from commandeering a junior colleague's desk to apparently, in younger years, having flouted Abe Rosenthal's dictum about fucking the elephants and covering the circus. In the prewar period, by Mr. Foer's account, Ms. Miller was intoxicated by her access to high-powered sources and capable of browbeating Times editors into letting her run sketchy reports without interference.
Mr. Foer's piece "speaks for itself in its sleaziness," Ms. Miller said-then asked to strike that remark from the record. For further comment, she deferred to David Barstow, another Pulitzer winner ("He did this year what I did in 2002").
Mr. Barstow said that Ms. Miller had referred Mr. Foer to him, giving the New York writer his cell-phone number. But Mr. Foer, he said, had never called.
"I would have told him on the record how much I admire Judy's passion for the news," Mr. Barstow said.
Why the omission? "I think that guided by anonymous sources with suspect motives, he knew what his story was going to say, and he didn't want to muddy it with facts that didn't support his thesis," Mr. Barstow said. He paused. "Sound familiar?"
In a building where the Irony-O-Meters are so shaky that The Times could run the editor's note lamenting the burial of one important follow-up story on page A10 on page A10, nuance is a dangerous art.
"The same charge that's leveled against her," Mr. Barstow explained.
The attacks on his colleague, Mr. Barstow continued, disgusted him. "It's really sickening for me to watch her get trashed by media critics who have never put themselves on the line the way she has," he said.
In that, Mr. Barstow echoed Mr. Keller's quoted comments in the New York piece: "It's a little galling to watch her pursued by some of these armchair media ethicists who have never ventured into a war zone or earned the right to carry Judy's laptop," Mr. Keller reportedly told Mr. Foer.
So on the one hand, The Times is declaring that the investigation into its W.M.D. coverage is "unfinished business," to be continued with "aggressive reporting." On the other hand, Mr. Keller is adopting the surly defensiveness of a failed relief pitcher, snapping about sportswriters who've never played the game. (Though thanks to the Iraq campaign, a whole new generation of reporters should now have a Red Badge of Courage that entitles them to tote Ms. Miller's computer.)
Where, then, does this leave Ms. Miller? One rumor in the building had the brass, in the ultimate stand-by-your-woman gesture, preparing to send her back to Iraq. Ms. Miller declined to address that speculation. "I am continuing on this story," she said, "and I don't discuss where I'm going with anyone."
The Times declined to comment on the Foer story. But a spokesperson was more forthcoming about Ms. Miller's itinerary. Is Ms. Miller Baghdad bound?
"No," the spokesperson wrote via e-mail. "We have no such plans."