As they seek to extricate The New York Times from the latest Judith Miller quagmire, Executive Editor Bill Keller and Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. face a stark choice: To whom do they owe their primary loyalty, their employees and shareholders or their readers?
The paper's readers have every right to feel spurned these days. That is, at least when it comes to the Times' coverage of one of the biggest stories of the day: the role of itself and Miller in the Plame leak case. Those readers remain loyal to the paper for a simple reason: They believe that it is the news organization best equipped -- and most inclined -- to deliver the closest approximation of the full truth that it can muster. Has the Times really honored its side of the bargain?
It's hard not to conclude that right now, the paper is more interested in protecting Miller and its own “brand” than it is in protecting the interests of its loyal readers. The paper's coverage of Miller's release from jail and her subsequent grand jury testimony has been marred by unanswered questions and inconsistencies between the news and editorial sides. For instance, here's how the paper's editorial on Saturday, October 1, two days after Miller left jail, addressed the central question of why Miller had waited so long before agreeing to testify:
“If Ms. Miller's source had wanted to release her from her promise, he could have held a press conference and identified himself. And obviously, he could have picked up the phone. Ms. Miller believed -- and we agree -- that it was not her place to try to hound him into telling her that she did not need to keep her promise.”
These sentences defy simple logic. Why would her source -- I. Lewis Libby -- have taken new proactive steps to “release her from her promise” when Libby believed he'd already done that more than a year ago, as the same day's Times stories had reported? Even if you err on Miller's side and accept the idea that Libby hadn't communicated his waiver clearly, Libby surely thought he had. So why would it dawn on him to do so again? Does the editorial board think Libby was flat-out lying when he said he thought he'd communicated this adequately to Miller? We'll never know, because the editorial doesn't even delve into Libby's version of events, depriving readers of information critical to any evaluation of Miller's motives.
Speaking of those motives, when the editorial goes on to confide that Miller believed it was “not her place” to “hound” her source, the reader is similarly cheated of vital information. If she didn't want to hound him, why did one of her own lawyers, Robert Bennett, reopen discussions with Libby's attorney, as the Times reported that same day? Did her lawyer act without her permission? Perhaps the editorial board doesn't think Bennett's reaching out rose to the level of “hounding.” If so, we'll never know, because this potential inconsistency was simply never addressed.
What's more, what's the source of the assertion that Miller was loathe to "hound" Libby? That's a pretty fine gradation of motive, and if Miller has said this publicly somewhere, I missed it. Perhaps Miller simply told her editorial-board colleagues this (possibly over another “third of a martini in a gorgeous glass,” as she put it upon her release). If so, readers need to know this. If the paper is going to share such subtle shadings of her line of reasoning, it should at least source them. Also, why didn't the Times' news stories on Miller's decision report this revelation about her thinking?
These questions about motive -- and the paper's treatment of them -- are important. They go to the heart of the Times' self-flattering version of events -- that Miller is a Gandhi-like figure driven solely by principle and unswayed by the worldly discomforts of prison, and that the Times is her steadfast defender.
There are other glaring problems. The paper reported that one of Miller's lawyers said she had agreed to testify only after the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, agreed to limit his questioning to her conversations with Libby. This begs a host of other questions. What conversations did Miller not want to talk about, and with whom? If the answer is Karl Rove, why can't -- or why won't -- she get her desired level of permission from him to talk about their discussions, the way Matthew Cooper did? If it's not Rove, who is it? Did Miller view these other conversations as incriminating? If not, why didn't she get the go-ahead from her sources to share them?
Perhaps these questions have already been put to Miller or her lawyers by Times reporters. Maybe she's declined to answer for her own good reasons. But if so, shouldn't the Times report, in excrutiating detail, exactly what questions Miller won't answer? If not, shouldn't the Times pose the questions to Miller right now? It seems inevitable that a failure to do so would make Times brass look worried that such a line of questioning could reveal fresh evidence of coziness between Miller and Bush administration sources. That, of course, would lead to further questions about the paper's reliance on her for weapons-of-mass-destruction reporting -- one of the most sensitive and embarrassing episodes in the paper's history.
Indeed, in this context, haven't internal deliberations by the Times' masthead about how to approach the story in themselves become a big part of this story?
In Hard News, Seth Mnookin's book about the Jayson Blair scandal, the author recounts that David Barstow, one of the reporters assigned the enormous task of setting the record straight, described his feelings about the assignment this way: “We all in some way love the institution. It's a complicated love, but there was a sense that the best service we could do here was use all of our combined skills to do the most complete job we could humanly do.”
The ongoing Miller saga, of course, is different from the Blair story in many ways. Rather than being about one reporter's blatant and pathological wrongdoing, it's about one reporter who was jailed for refusing to reveal sources, a key part of the job. Indeed, this needn't be about “getting” Miller; the let-her-rot-in-jail attacks in the blogosphere are both unbecoming and counterproductive, and, what's more, the general principle that confidentiality should be maintained at all costs is the right one, even if the sources Miller protected are anything but heroic whistle-blowers.
But the current story is, in many ways, far more important than the Blair tale, and the questions that are demanding to be asked of Miller are critical to our understanding of it. So, too, are the even bigger questions about The New York Times' role. It's all fairly screaming out for aggressive reporting and editing -- from the paper's own reporters and editors. They'd be doing it, as David Barstow might put it, for the love of the institution -- and more important, for the love of its readers.
Greg Sargent, a contributing editor at New York magazine, writes a bi-weekly column for The American Prospect Online. He can be reached at greg_sargent@newyorkmag.com.
