'Vanity Fair' Offers Fresh Details on Judith Miller Saga

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001615297

In a lengthy feature piece on this autumn's Judith Miller saga forthcoming in the January issue of Vanity Fair (on newstands Dec. 13), writer Seth Mnookin covers much familiar ground but also reveals new details and complaints from the reporter's colleagues at The New York Times. Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. also gets a good working-over from unnamed in-house critics.

One of the fresh scoops in the piece, which is titled, "Unreliable Sources," concerns Sulzberger barring Times reporters from talking to Russell Lewis, the former president and CEO of The New York Times Co., when they were working on their extensive report on Miller going to jail and then testifying before the Plame grand jury.

Mnookin relates that according to sources, when the reporters pressed Sulzberger on why he did that, he replied with a laugh and a quip: "Because I don't know what the f---he's going to tell you." (Earlier this year Lewis co-authored with Sulzberger a Times Op-Ed piece championing Miller's cause.)

Mnookin describes step-by-step how the reporters, including Don Van Natta and Janny Scott, were picked to write that October piece and how Miller often failed to cooperate fully with them. She allegedly refused to talk to Scott because she had not bothered to write to her in jail.