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Under fire from all sides, will the paper of record finally come clean on Judy Miller's role in Plamegate?
Photos by Ap/WideWorld
I. Lewis Libby, Joseph Wilson and Judith Miller
Oct 14, 2005 | It isn't usually a good idea to predict what will appear in this weekend's newspapers. News, by definition, involves the unpredictable. Still, by late Thursday afternoon there were signs that the New York Times was poised to finally publish its account of reporter Judith Miller's role in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, which the paper has been promising to do since shortly after Miller was mysteriously sprung from jail two weeks ago. Some observers now expect the report to appear Sunday. The question is, will that be too late?
For months, the paper of record has been under fire from critics for essentially putting up a smoke screen around its beleaguered reporter. By lagging behind other papers in reporting on Miller, critics have been left to speculate that the mighty Times is running scared, that it's been reluctant to look into just what Miller knew and what political figures she may have been in bed with.
Until now, the Times has offered a legalistic and none too convincing explanation for the paper's reluctance to answer countless important questions about whom Miller was talking to in the summer of 2003, when the White House apparently launched a campaign to discredit former ambassador and Bush critic Joseph Wilson. Even though Miller was released from jail on Sept. 29, Judge Thomas Hogan, who is overseeing the grand jury investigating the Plame leak, did not immediately lift the contempt order he'd issued when Miller initially refused to testify. Times editors have said that Miller's lawyers advised her not to talk to reporters until the judge lifted that order; and without getting the full story from Miller, the Times simply couldn't publish anything on Miller's role in the Plame case, they explain.
On Wednesday afternoon, that justification vanished. Miller made her second appearance before the grand jury, and Hogan then lifted the contempt order. Bill Keller, the paper's executive editor, told Times reporter David Johnston that the judge's ruling "should clear the way for The Times to do what we've been yearning to do: tell the story." Asked by Salon to clarify this statement -- did Keller mean that Miller would talk to Times reporters who are charged to investigate her role in the Plame case? -- Keller was cagey: "If you're patient, you'll read your answer in our paper," he wrote in an e-mail. (Miller's attorneys did not return calls for comment.)
An explanation this weekend of Miller's role in the Plame case wouldn't come a moment too soon. "The New York Times is now being criticized by its friends," says Alex Jones, a former Times reporter who heads Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. The Times' silence about its own role has not only riled its longtime critics; the paper's stance has also discomfited admirers, folks both inside and outside the paper, who, Jones says, "feel that its position as an institution is important, and is threatened." The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz spoke to some at the Times who said the mood in the newsroom is more sullen now than it was during the Jayson Blair scandal.
"No matter what Jayson Blair turned out to have done," says Jay Rosen, the New York University journalism professor, "this touches on something more important: the Times' relationship to power."
In not-for-attribution conversations with Salon, staffers at the paper cautioned that things aren't as fevered as they were with Blair -- nobody at the Times is calling for the editors' heads yet -- but the despair is real, and many would like answers from their bosses.
The questions about Miller reach back to her controversial reporting on weapons of mass destruction and her role in publicizing the Bush administration's rationale for going to war. Her sharpest critics accuse her of aiding and abetting the attacks on Wilson and Plame, and of taking a stand as a First Amendment martyr only to rehabilitate her image. They hold the Times guilty by association; by protecting her, they say the newspaper is complicit in the Bush administration's rush to war.
Critics have further speculated that the paper has warned its Op-Ed columnists not to write about this case. Gail Collins, the Times' editorial page editor, has denied this charge, and one columnist told Salon that columnists had been given no direction whatsoever about what to write -- or what not to write -- on Miller. On Wednesday, Nicholas Kristof told the New York Observer that he may well write about the case: "I'm waiting, as a lot of people are, for the Times opus on it, and I don't feel right now that I understand it well enough to weigh in. I'm eagerly looking forward to that piece. I think it's important, and I may write about it if I have something useful to add."
Byron Calame, the paper's public editor, has also been accused of ignoring this case. Charged with pursuing the public's questions with editors and reporters at the paper, he's appeared to make no effort to determine Miller's role in the Plame case. "I continue to watch developments in the Plame investigation with special interest," he told Salon when asked about the case earlier this week. "If and when I have something to say, I will say it to the readers of the Times."
On Thursday, Calame was more forthcoming. "The lifting of the contempt order against Judith Miller of The New York Times in connection with the Valerie Wilson leak investigation leaves no reason for the paper to avoid providing a full explanation of the situation," Calame wrote on his weblog. Miller has already agreed to speak to him about the case at some point, Calame said.
