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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Many -- including many Salon readers -- refuse to rally behind jailed, controversial New York Times reporter Judy Miller. But anyone who truly supports freedom of speech needs to.
Jul 13, 2005 | "New York Times reporter Judith Miller is sent to jail for contempt of court, but not for writing months of front-page fiction about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," a reader in California recently wrote to Salon. "Al Capone did time in prison for tax evasion, but not for murder. I guess you have to take what you can get."
That letter, which I quote in its entirety, pretty much sums up the response so far from Salon's readers (and much of the lefty blogosphere) to our two recent news stories about Miller, who is now serving a prison sentence for refusing to identify to federal prosecutors the confidential White House source who leaked information about CIA agent Valerie Plame, wife of a former U.S. diplomat highly critical of the Bush administration.
At least on the leftward half of the political spectrum, there is a wide gulf between the way the media is telling the Miller story and the way the public understands it. "I suppose the journalistic breast-beating over Miller going to jail was to be expected," wrote Elizabeth Bass, in a letter we published a few days ago. "No profession loves to trumpet its own importance more. But am I alone in just not giving a shit?"
Bass is by no means alone in her cynicism, nor completely unjustified. We can learn things by gazing into this abyss between the press and the public, but the sense of vertigo is not especially comforting.
Many readers have been less temperate than the author of the Capone letter, not to mention less amusing and less succinct. Salon also received at least two letters suggesting, with apparent seriousness, that Miller deserves not just prison time but the death penalty for her journalistic sins. (Salon published one of those, which I think might have been a failure in judgment.) A more lenient correspondent suggested a life sentence, while many others seemed to share one reader's pithy but less specific sentiment: "I hope she rots." (Most of the letters I am quoting in this article have not been published, and in those cases I am not identifying the authors by name.)
To describe the whole Miller-Plame affair as murky, or profoundly ironic, doesn't even halfway do it justice. As Salon reporter Farhad Manjoo wrote after the June 27 Supreme Court decision that all but ensured Miller would go to jail, the tangled narrative "is like something out of Kafka." One of the things that enraged readers, it seems, is the fact that the first wave of stories about Miller's legal peril (Manjoo's included) judiciously avoided confronting what another of our letter-writers called "the elephant in the middle of the room."
That elephant, of course, was Miller herself, and the notorious role she played during the Bush administration's buildup to the war in Iraq. I myself wrote an article last December suggesting that Miller and her newspaper, having been thoroughly hustled by Ahmed Chalabi (possibly at taxpayer expense), bore more responsibility for the Iraq misadventure than anyone this side of George W. Bush. I'd be lying if I said I'd never felt any childish moments of schadenfreude, or any feeling that karmic justice was being dispensed, as she got closer and closer to prison. Miller is also spectacularly ill-suited for the role of poster child for the use of confidential sources or First Amendment freedoms in general because, as numerous commentators have noted, the source she's now protecting wasn't some selfless, embattled whistle-blower, but rather "a high government operative determined to stab a whistle-blower in the back," as a Salon reader from Washington put it. (At this point, we'd all be shocked if her informant wasn't Karl Rove, or someone right next to him.)
So it was reasonable to expect at least some anti-Miller letters in the wake of Manjoo's and freelance reporter Michael Scherer's Salon stories about the Miller case. Like virtually everyone else in every branch of the media, Manjoo and Scherer reported Miller's impending and then actual imprisonment as a dark day for press freedom. Also like almost everyone else in the media, both stories sought to put the bizarre details of Miller's dilemma in context, while dancing around its most uncomfortable elements: Miller's tarnished record and the presumed involvement of Rove, dark prince of the George W. Bush White House.
But it's safe to say that everyone here was surprised by the consistently enraged tone of the letters -- furious might be a better word -- and by the insistence of many writers that Salon's coverage had fundamentally missed the story. Of the dozens of letters we have received on this issue over the last few weeks, no more than a half-dozen have supported the general tenor of Manjoo and Scherer's reporting, or indeed have seen the Miller case as in any way a matter of fundamental freedoms.
"What a steaming load of treacle and crap," the Washington reader wrote about the latter story, describing it as "laying on the sentimental details with a trowel" in an attempt to evoke reader sympathy for Miller as she was led off to jail. "I've had my objections to Salon articles before but this is unquestionably the worst piece you've ever run on any subject."
