NY Times Confronted By Ms. Rice In 2002 & More Miller

(This is a REALLY long article with lots of interesting, questionable stuff)

Times Confronted
By Ms. Rice In 2002
But Held Ground
By Gabriel Sherman

In late August of 2002, David Sanger, White House correspondent for The New York Times, found himself in the far west wing of the West Wing: at President George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex.

There, in what must have been a fairly routine meeting with then–National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, he was told in no uncertain terms what the White House had thought of much of The Times’ reporting on the President’s Iraq policy that summer. They were not happy.

What was Ms. Rice so mad about?

Nobody at The Times said they were asked to advance a particular storyline. “All known thought,” with the benefit of hindsight, now appears to have been boiled down to the thinking of Ms. Miller’s sources, appearing on page 1, and the thinking of everyone else’s, inside the paper.

Still, the same editors—who might have discussed less-sensitive stories at length to vet them for the front page—said they were unaware that other reporters were finding evidence that conflicted with the storyline Ms. Miller was establishing with her reporting.

“If anything, people were scared by her stories,” a senior Times editor said. “They were complicated, and they dealt with this material that no one understood. They became controversial fast. The idea they just appeared in the paper is absurd. But maybe they didn’t get edited as well they should have.”
http://www.observer.com/pageone_offtherec.asp