NYTimes Exec. Editor Gets Delivery From the Clue Train.

Keller Memo Admits 'Mistakes,' Regrets in Miller Saga

... I wish we had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD as soon as I became executive editor. At the time, we thought we had compelling reasons for kicking the issue down the road. The paper had just been through a major trauma, the Jayson Blair episode, and needed to regain its equilibrium. It felt somehow unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors. I was trying to get my arms around a huge new job, appoint my team, get the paper fully back to normal, and I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction.

So it was a year before we got around to really dealing with the controversy. At that point, we published a long editors' note acknowledging the prewar journalistic lapses, and -- to my mind, at least as important - - we intensified aggressive reporting aimed at exposing the way bad or manipulated intelligence had fed the drive to war. (I'm thinking of our excellent investigation of those infamous aluminum tubes, the report on how the Iraqi National Congress recruited exiles to promote Saddam's WMD threat, our close look at the military's war-planning intelligence, and the dissection, one year later, of Colin Powell's U.N. case for the war, among other examples. The fact is sometimes overlooked that a lot of the best reporting on how this intel fiasco came about appeared in the NYT.)

By waiting a year to own up to our mistakes, we allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, we fear, we fostered an impression that The Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers. If we had lanced the WMD boil earlier, we might have damped any suspicion that THIS time, the paper was putting the defense of a reporter above the duty to its readers.

I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own. It is a natural and proper instinct to defend reporters when the government seeks to interfere in our work. And under other circumstances it might have been fine to entrust the details -- the substance of the confidential interviews, the notes -- to lawyers who would be handling the case. But in this case I missed what should have been significant alarm bells. Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (In November of 2003 Phil Taubman tried to ascertain whether any of our correspondents had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper.

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Ok, now fire the liar.

ignoring a potential new one? If I had an employee with that logic I would fire them. Does that make any sense at all? If the paper had a black eye from Blair why wouldn't they put procedures in to place to make sure something like that, or worse, doesn't happen again?

They could have done nothing. They could have look over the evidence everyone outside the US and on this board were looking at. Instead, they went along with everyone else. They could have listened to Krugman!

The NYT is dead. Along with most of the MSM. Actually all of it I believe.

52 Week High 41.62
52 Week Low 26.85

That's a shame.

Graph here:
http://www.pcquote.com/stocks/quote.php?symbol=NYT

Uhm, when you have a reporter that's in dutch like this, and you ask her to write her side of things for Sunday publication, and she doesn't turn in her copy until it's too late Saturday for it to make any of the national editions, and you're going to have to run it on only the local editions and online, shouldn't there be, I dunno,

GIANT ALARM BELLS GOING OFF IN YOUR HEAD???

Keller should hang his peanut head in shame for getting taken so badly by his baldly dissembling reporter, and then having to admit it in print. I've been fooled before, and I usually try to keep it quiet if it's a really big one, like this one is.

Dick Stevenson has expressed the larger lesson here in an e-mail that strikes me as just right: “I think there is, or should be, a contract between the paper and its reporters. The contract holds that the paper will go to the mat to back them up institutionally -- but only to the degree that the reporter has lived up to his or her end of the bargain, specifically to have conducted him or herself in a way consistent with our legal, ethical and journalistic standards, to have been open and candid with the paper about sources, mistakes, conflicts and the like, and generally to deserve having the reputations of all of us put behind him or her. In that way, everybody knows going into a battle exactly what the situation is, what we're fighting for, the degree to which the facts might counsel compromise or not, and the degree to which our collective credibility should be put on the line.”