of her wording, was used by administration officials as they made the prewar rounds on the Sunday talk shows to warn about “mushroom clouds” appearing on the horizon. When no WMDs were found in Iraq, the Times conducted a postmortem, combing through Miller’s reporting; this resulted in mortifying mea culpas in both a special “editor’s note” and an editorial admitting that the paper had been “taken in.”
Plamegate. The Times got its fingers broken again in another fiasco involving Judith Miller. In this instance, the issue was the leaking of a covert CIA operative’s name, Valerie Plame, to the media. Allegedly this was done by high-ranking officials in the Bush White House in retaliation against Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who had disparaged the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein tried to buy yellow-cake uranium in Niger. The Times initially editorialized fiercely for a special prosecutor, but quickly changed its tune when that prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, sent a subpoena to Miller. Invoking journalistic confidentiality, Miller refused to name the source who had “outed” Plame to her, and she defied Fitzgerald’s grand jury subpoena, a jailable offense, even though she had written nothing about the case.
Miller’s case became a cause célèbre throughout journalism. To Sulzberger, it was a moral crusade, as he took to the airwaves and had “Free Judy” buttons printed up. After losing in protracted court proceedings, Miller finally went to jail, but after eighty-eight days there she decided to testify. When she named Lewis “Scooter” Libby as her source, many believed that she might have been invoking journalistic privilege to protect someone in the White House who had committed a crime or had been engaged in a vengeance-driven smear campaign against Joe Wilson.
Its credibility once again under attack, Times editors commissioned yet another internal inquiry, and produced a long take-out in late October 2005, which unfortunately for the Times had the same effect as their infamous postmortem on Jayson Blair. It painted an unflattering picture of its own reporter, who had agreed to identify Libby as a “former Hill staffer” to hide his fingerprints on the leak, had “forgotten” a meeting with Libby as well as the notes she took during that meeting, and had written Plame’s name in her notebook as “Valerie Flame.” As the New York Observer characterized the accounts, they told “a tale of a dysfunctional staffer running loose at a dysfunctional institution, with historic consequences.”
Within a week of her release, Miller went from being a Times hero to a pariah. The editor, Bill Keller, the public editor, Byron
Calame, and columnist Maureen Dowd all took aim, making it clear that Miller would never return to the Times newsroom. Miller soon engineered a graceful, lucrative exit and announced her “retirement” from the paper, saying, “Arthur was there for me—until he wasn’t.” As Gay Talese, a former Times reporter, said to the New Yorker in reference to Sulzberger Jr.’s handling of Plamegate, “You get a bad king every once in a while.”
NSA Wiretapping. The paper was thrust into a defensive position once again by a December 2005 story about the National Security Agency’s warrantless and possibly illegal wiretapping of international communications between people on U.S. soil and people abroad who were suspected of ties to terrorism. The sources for the story, by the Washington bureau reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, were “nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program.” They had talked to the Times “because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.”
But the NSA story raised the issue of exposing national secrets during wartime. President Bush called the front-page report a “shameful act.” Others accused the
Plamegate. The Times got its fingers broken again in another fiasco involving Judith Miller. In this instance, the issue was the leaking of a covert CIA operative’s name, Valerie Plame, to the media. Allegedly this was done by high-ranking officials in the Bush White House in retaliation against Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who had disparaged the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein tried to buy yellow-cake uranium in Niger. The Times initially editorialized fiercely for a special prosecutor, but quickly changed its tune when that prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, sent a subpoena to Miller. Invoking journalistic confidentiality, Miller refused to name the source who had “outed” Plame to her, and she defied Fitzgerald’s grand jury subpoena, a jailable offense, even though she had written nothing about the case.
Miller’s case became a cause célèbre throughout journalism. To Sulzberger, it was a moral crusade, as he took to the airwaves and had “Free Judy” buttons printed up. After losing in protracted court proceedings, Miller finally went to jail, but after eighty-eight days there she decided to testify. When she named Lewis “Scooter” Libby as her source, many believed that she might have been invoking journalistic privilege to protect someone in the White House who had committed a crime or had been engaged in a vengeance-driven smear campaign against Joe Wilson.
Its credibility once again under attack, Times editors commissioned yet another internal inquiry, and produced a long take-out in late October 2005, which unfortunately for the Times had the same effect as their infamous postmortem on Jayson Blair. It painted an unflattering picture of its own reporter, who had agreed to identify Libby as a “former Hill staffer” to hide his fingerprints on the leak, had “forgotten” a meeting with Libby as well as the notes she took during that meeting, and had written Plame’s name in her notebook as “Valerie Flame.” As the New York Observer characterized the accounts, they told “a tale of a dysfunctional staffer running loose at a dysfunctional institution, with historic consequences.”
Within a week of her release, Miller went from being a Times hero to a pariah. The editor, Bill Keller, the public editor, Byron
Calame, and columnist Maureen Dowd all took aim, making it clear that Miller would never return to the Times newsroom. Miller soon engineered a graceful, lucrative exit and announced her “retirement” from the paper, saying, “Arthur was there for me—until he wasn’t.” As Gay Talese, a former Times reporter, said to the New Yorker in reference to Sulzberger Jr.’s handling of Plamegate, “You get a bad king every once in a while.”
NSA Wiretapping. The paper was thrust into a defensive position once again by a December 2005 story about the National Security Agency’s warrantless and possibly illegal wiretapping of international communications between people on U.S. soil and people abroad who were suspected of ties to terrorism. The sources for the story, by the Washington bureau reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, were “nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program.” They had talked to the Times “because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.”
But the NSA story raised the issue of exposing national secrets during wartime. President Bush called the front-page report a “shameful act.” Others accused the
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