:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 10.24.2005 ::

:: "All The Blame That's Fit To Print" ::

From the CBSNews.com blog

There’s no shortage of schadenfreude being experienced over The New York Times’ problems. Those with one bone or another to pick with Judy Miller, bloggers who chant the mantra of MSM demise and critics of the war in Iraq are just a few who are reveling in the now-very public internal fighting at the paper.

I say good for The Times.

Not praise for the mess they find themselves in, surely. Miller’s pre-war stories about weapons of mass destruction, the paper’s apology for them, not to mention Miller’s still-curious role in the Valerie Plame case are among the things the Times’ has been suffering from for some time, and will continue to haunt them in the foreseeable future. And while Miller’s attorney, Robert Bennett, may be right about old scores being settled, at least we’re seeing a public airing of it all.

The Times’ lengthy reporting on Miller and her involvement with the grand jury, and her own first-person account last week, led to this weekend’s burst of discussion. Not all of it pretty, but out there for everyone to see. What kicked off this round was a memo to the paper’s staff from Executive Editor Bill Keller, who apologized for not taking up the issue of the WMD reporting earlier, writing:

“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.”

Read more here.

ALSO
Colleagues call for removal of New York Times journalist in CIA leak case
Gary Younge in New York
The Guardian

The New York Times continued to implode under the weight of internal criticism yesterday as the public clamour for one its most prominent reporters, Judith Miller, to be removed from her job gained pace.

The row threatens to engulf one of the country's most venerated newspapers in a bitter dispute over its reporting of the Iraq war, its unquestioning defence of an allegedly rogue reporter and its editor's ability to assert his authority over his staff.

AND
Not-So-Friendly Fire
By Howard Kurtz
The Washington Post

Doing the Right Thing
American Journalism Review

FINALLY
Throwing Miller and Libby Overboard is Not Enough
By Arianna Huffington
Yahoo! News

So the New York Times has finally decided to throw Judy Miller overboard. The lambasting that began with Bill Keller's memo and continued with Maureen Dowd's column, has now culminated with Byron Calame's Public Editor column. But everything the Times is now castigating Miller for was well known, or easily knowable, weeks and months ago when the paper was lionizing her as the Joan of Sag Harbor.

Her horrendous coverage of WMD and her all-elbows style of dealing with her colleagues -- which now so offends Times' sensibilities -- were not only tolerated, but encouraged.

You could get whiplash reading the New York Times these days. After all, it was less than a month ago when Judy Miller was released from jail and whisked off by Arthur Sulzberger to the Ritz Carlton for a steak and a martini "served in a gorgeous glass." The paper that was even scooped on covering her release was feting and celebrating her.

Now the Times has clearly turned on the woman its editorial page had painted as a modern-day Rosa Parks. Ridding the Times of Judy is a good start, but the Times' problems are bigger than Ms. Run Amok. In the same way that however hard the White House tries (and as Josh Marshall points out, it's trying very, very hard) to turn Libby into Mr. Run Amok, it will not succeed in pinning it all on Scooter. The crisis at the New York Times is about much more than Judy Miller, and the crisis at the White House is about much more than Scooter Libby.

posted by me

:: 11:31:00 AM [+] ::
...