Judy Miller: The "Slanderous" Bloggers Destroyed me

The bloggers were without editing, without a way for people to understand what was good, what was well reported—to distinguish between the straight and the slanderous. Things would get instantly picked up, magnified, and volumized.

8: NYT
8.1: Miller
8.1.1: WMD Articals:
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1984429

Jun, 2004:
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/index.html -:
During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a
series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein’s ambition and
capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on
information provided by Chalabi and his allies almost all of which
have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate.

-also-

Her Iraq coverage didn’t just depend on Chalabi. It also relied
heavily on his patrons in the Pentagon. Some of these sources, like
Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, would occasionally talk to her on
the record. She relied especially heavily on the Office of Special
Plans, an intelligence unit established beneath Undersecretary of
Defense Douglas Feith. The office was charged with uncovering evidence
of Al Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein that the CIA might have missed. In
particular, Miller is said to have depended on a controversial neocon
in Feith’s office named Michael Maloof. At one point, in December
2001, Maloof’s security clearance was revoked. In April, Risen
reported in the Times, Several intelligence professionals say he
came under scrutiny because of suspicions that he had leaked
classified information in the past to the news media, a charge that
Mr. Maloof denies. While Miller might not have intended to march
in lockstep with these hawks, she was caught up in an almost
irresistible cycle. Because she kept printing the neocon party line,
the neocons kept coming to her with huge stories and great quotes,
constantly expanding her access.

8.1.1.1: On Dec. 3, 2002, Miller aired in the Times the allegations
of an "unnamed informant" who said that a deceased Russian scientist
("Madam Smallpox") might have given Iraq a virulent strain of
smallpox. Nine months later, Dafna Linzer of the Associated Press
authoritatively reported: "U.S. Weapons Hunters Find No Evidence Iraq
Had Smallpox" (Sept. 18).

8.1.1.2: April 21 "baseball cap" story - unidentified source wearing
cap discloses WMD processing locations - pegged bogon detector.

8.1.1.3: And, most memorably, she co-wrote a piece in which
administration officials suggested that Iraq had attempted to
import aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons. Vice-President Dick
Cheney trumpeted the story on Meet the Press, closing the
circle.
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/index.html -:

8.1.1.4: One incident that still rankles happened last April, when
Miller co-bylined a story with Douglas Jehl on the WMD search
that included a quote from Amy Smithson, an analyst formerly at
the Henry L. Stimson Center. A day after it appeared, the Times
learned that the quote was deeply problematic. To begin with, it
had been supplied to Miller in an e-mail that began, Briefly
and on background a condition that Miller had flatly
broken by naming her source. Miller committed a further offense
by paraphrasing the quote and distorting Smithson’s
analysis. One person who viewed the e-mail says that it
attributed views to Smithson that she clearly didn’t hold. An
embarrassing correction ensued. And while the offense had been
entirely Miller’s, there was nothing in the correction
indicating Jehl’s innocence.
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/index.html -:

8.1.2: (4.4.1.1) Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha (META)

8.1.2.1: "General Judith Miller" -- as Shafer has dubbed her -- was
accused by a half dozen officers of intimidating soldiers
searching for WMD. An Army officer told Kurtz: "Judith was always
issuing threats of either going to The New York Times or to the
Secretary of Defense." Another charged: "She ended up almost
hijacking the mission" of the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha
(META), which was charged with examining potential Iraqi weapon
sites after the war.
Her journalistic coup lay, rather, in talking her way into getting
clearance from the Pentagon and being allowed to embed with the
75th. As Drogin told Layton, "she was in a great position to get
the initial confirmation in the field" when WMD were found. But
they were not found, despite her best efforts to make readers
think that they were or were about to be.

8.1.2.2: Eugene Pomeroy, public-affairs officer for MET Alpha
According to Pomeroy, as well as an editor at the Times,
Miller had helped negotiate her own embedding agreement with the
Pentagon an agreement so sensitive that, according to one Times
editor, Rumsfeld himself signed off on it.
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/index.html -:

8.1.3: Pals with Chalabi (7.1)
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/index.html -:

8.1.4: Pals with King Hussein
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/index.html -:
As a correspondent for The Progressive and National Public Radio, she
turned her academic interest into a professional one, traveling to the
region and cultivating a network of highly placed sources. Nina
Totenberg, a colleague from NPR, recalls a party in the mid-seventies
at which Jordan’s King Hussein caught a glimpse of Miller across the
room and howled, Juuuuddddy!

Kiiiinnnggg, she responded.

8.1.5: Pals with:
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/index.html -:
Miller had ready access to many Mideast potentates. As she shuttled
between meetings with Hussein, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and
Palestinian Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat in 1984, her
colleagues joked about the Miller Plan for peace.
and
From her first day at the Times, Miller’s life and work have been hard
to separate, which for a reporter is both a strength and a
weakness. She’s a passionate person she gets caught up in her
sources passionately, one of her Times colleagues told me. Friends
from her earliest days in Washington noted that she didn’t surround
herself with people her own age. She sought out the best and brightest
at the city’s highest levels, dating Larry Sterne, the Washington
Post’s foreign editor, and hanging out with the defense gurus Richard
Perle and Walter Slocum. These people were powerful. But they were
also interesting, and Judy liked talking to them. She is curious and
enthusiastic, says one friend from this period.

8.1.6: Jeffery Goldberg
Remember, everyone was obsessed with the White House sex story, says
New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who was invited by the paper to
join Miller in an investigation unit to examine Al Qaeda. Goldberg
found her an impossibly difficult colleague. But he also realized her
value. She happened to be prescient about the rise of the global
jihad. And it was her unpleasant hyper-aggressiveness that enabled her
to help force a very important story the possibility of a marriage
between WMD proliferators and global jihadists closer to the top of
the agenda.