Uproar at the Times: Unreliable Sources - Vanity Fair Article

[im10ashus]

On Monday, October 3, a frightened and vulnerable Judith Miller walked into The New York Times's cluttered Manhattan newsroom. It was the first time in three months she'd been inside the only professional home she'd known since 1977. Four days earlier, Miller had been released from Virginia's Alexandria Detention Center, where she'd been incarcerated after refusing to testify in front of a federal grand jury investigating whether government officials had leaked the identity of undercover C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame Wilson. After 85 days in jail, Miller, aware that she could end up spending more than another year behind bars, had negotiated a deal that allowed her to testify. ("I don't want to spend my life in here," she'd told a friend while in Virginia.) Miller's imprisonment, and her release, had made her a central figure in a scandal that was threatening to envelop the White House, as special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald homed in on Bush-administration officials who now seemed destined to be indicted for their role in the case.

Miller was not the first writer, or the first Times reporter, to have been jailed for refusing to share confidential information with government officials. In 1978, the Times's Myron Farber was imprisoned for 40 days for his refusal to hand over notes in a murder trial. As recently as 2001, Vanessa Leggett, a former private investigator who was working on a book about the killing of a Houston socialite, stayed in jail for 168 days rather than turn over her notes to prosecutors. Unlike Miller, both Farber and Leggett were released from jail without having to reveal any confidential information.

In Farber's case, as in Miller's, the Times had waged a passionate crusade on its reporter's behalf, and for seemingly good reason: there is no greater sacrifice, and no greater test of the journalist's code of ethics, than going to jail for refusing to name a confidential source. Without reporters' ability to promise confidentiality to those willing to share information that their bosses—or the government—might not want published, journalism as we know it would grind to a halt. During Miller's imprisonment, the paper's editorial page—run by Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and editorial-page editor Gail Collins—published piece after piece championing Miller as a highly principled American hero. "We stand with Ms. Miller and thank her for taking on that fight for the rest of us," read one typically crusading column.

In the Times's third-floor newsroom, Miller was not given a hero's welcome. (She had been so wary of the reception she might receive that she'd asked a friend to escort her into the building.) The more than 100 reporters and editors who had gathered in the center of the room—traditionally the site of Pulitzer Prize celebrations—greeted Miller with tepid applause. Miller, always slim, had lost quite a bit of weight during her confinement and looked pale and frail under her trademark pageboy.

http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/051212roco04

[leveymg]

1. Sultzberger out next? The end of the neocon NYT?

From newsroom revolt to the halving of Timesco stock, the publisher seems be about to take it on the neck, and there are precious few at his family's business who appear ready to stand up for him.

This may be the end of the neocons hold over the Times editors. Maybe, the paper can become a serious source of news again.

[iconoclastNYC]

2. God lets hope so.

But i think they'll just have to be less obvious about it. Miss Run Amok got sloppy....when you are doing the bidding of the national security state/military industrial complex you have to fly under the radar.

[im10ashus]

4. She was also afraid of spending more time in jail.

This was interesting:

Once he joined the case, Bob Bennett increasingly agitated to strike a deal. ("I don't want to represent a principle," Bennett told Miller upon taking her case. "I want to represent Judy Miller.") As Miller spent more and more time in jail, Bennett began to argue that Fitzgerald would likely convene a new grand jury after October 28, when the term of the initial one ended. That meant that Miller, instead of serving just under four months in jail, could have ended up spending almost two years behind bars. At the same time, Miller's husband, New York Review of Books founder Jason Epstein, was urging his wife to give up the fight.

[WI_DEM]

3. This is what she gets for going to bed with this administration

to help it promote an illegal and immoral war.

[leveymg]

5. And, don't screw around with the CIA , the DIA, and the FBI.

The neocons lost - they're not safe anywhere, anymore, no matter how high the Establishment family or institution they belong to, or what Administration official they've been sleeping with.

Judy and Art should just move back into that beach house, with or without their spouses, and stay there forever. They're luckier than most, really, who've been involved in this game. I think we'll see less genteel retirements for certain intelligence officers of an unnamed foreign power.