The nominations are in, and in the category of worst correspondent working for a major newspaper, the anti-Pulitzer goes to Judith Miller of The New York Times. From The New York Review of Books to New York magazine, Ms. Miller has gotten ripped for her role as the War Witch who sold America on the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
Her own newspaper has dumped on her and, in the process, dumped on some of its other reporters and their supervisors. In a strange and contorted résumé of The Times’ less-than-distinguished coverage of the war and the events leading up thereto, the paper’s editors wrote, "We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been." In the course of their mea culpa, the authors directed the readers to a Web site displaying a list of what they deemed the worst samples of their journalistic debacle. Ms. Miller’s byline is on a number of them.
How could the most prestigious newspaper in the United States—the paper read by much of the ruling class, if you will forgive the use of that odious but not undescriptive term, the paper from which most of the rest of big-time commercial mass media takes its cue—how could it, overbrimming with Harvard graduates yet also fashionably diverse in its staff, how could it have been "taken in"?
http://www.observer.com/pages/observer.asp
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