Times up for Judith Miller
BY PAUL D. COLFORD DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
New York Times reporter Judith Miller is in talks to sever her ties with the paper, an ignoble end to a 28-year run that has brought the paper significant prize and peril.
According to a lawyer familiar with the matter, the talks were at a standstill late yesterday because of a wide gap between Miller's demands and The Times' offer for her to leave.
"I'm afraid that I can't comment on anything just yet," Miller said in an E-mail. "No decisions on anything have been made ... more later."
She would go no further in a subsequent E-mail.
The haggling over her exit marked an extraordinary turnabout since Miller's testimony before a Washington grand jury, leaving the courthouse arm in arm with her publisher and longtime friend, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
The string of Times editorials that championed her cause, at Sulzberger's urging, abruptly ended Oct. 1, giving way to slams and second-guessing in the paper over her contacts with a White House source and her overall track record.
Led by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, the grand jury is probing if Bush administration officials sought to punish White House critic Joseph Wilson two years ago by leaking the identity of his wife, undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, breaking federal law.
"The apparent martyrdom of Judith Miller may have been overdone in the first place," said Tom Goldstein, a former Times staffer who teaches journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. "Now, she's fallen from grace and there's a lynch mob."
Miller's reporting first came into question before the Iraq war, when she wrote that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. A Times story recently quoted Miller saying that she "got it totally wrong."
When the Plame affair erupted, Times executive editor Bill Keller said in a memo Miller "seems to have misled" her immediate boss when she denied being on the receiving end of a White House "whisper campaign" to discredit Wilson.
The body blows continued last weekend. On Saturday, Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that Miller's "cagey confusion" in recalling contact with Vice President Cheney's chief of staff about Plame "makes people wonder whether her stint in ... jail was in part a career rehabilitation project."
Finally, last Sunday, Times ombudsman Byron Calame criticized "the journalistic shortcuts that Ms. Miller seems comfortable taking" and concluded it will be "difficult for her to return to the paper as a reporter."
Defending herself, Miller told Calame, "I had no intention of airing internal editorial policy disputes and disagreements at the paper, as a matter of principle and loyalty to those who stood by me during this ordeal. Others have chosen a different path ..."
Yet many Times staffers said they were amazed that Miller, the eye of a storm that's rocked the the paper like nothing since the Jayson Blair scandal in 2003, was still on the payroll.
"Judy's taking some time off," Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said, adding that The Times had no current plan to further probe Miller's role in the outing of Plame.