Saturday, October 22, 2005
Open Thread
There'll be no mutant enemy we shall certify. Political threads of sad remains will die.
Ow
Don't mess with MoDo.
...Gilliard runs it through his unique translation device.
I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp...
...Gilliard runs it through his unique translation device.
Friday, October 21, 2005
Open Thread
No thread can take your place, you know what I mean. We have the same intrigue as a court of kings.
Shoulda Listened To Those Pesky Bloggers
Keller:
I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own. It is a natural and proper instinct to defend reporters when the government seeks to interfere in our work. And under other circumstances it might have been fine to entrust the details -- the substance of the confidential interviews, the notes -- to lawyers who would be handling the case. But in this case I missed what should have been significant alarm bells. Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn’t know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (In November of 2003 Phil Taubman tried to ascertain whether any of our correspondents had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper.
...
...But if I had known the details of Judy’s entanglement with Libby, I’d have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense, and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises.
Dick Stevenson has expressed the larger lesson here in an e-mail that strikes me as just right: “I think there is, or should be, a contract between the paper and its reporters. The contract holds that the paper will go to the mat to back them up institutionally -- but only to the degree that the reporter has lived up to his or her end of the bargain, specifically to have conducted him or herself in a way consistent with our legal, ethical and journalistic standards, to have been open and candid with the paper about sources, mistakes, conflicts and the like, and generally to deserve having the reputations of all of us put behind him or her. In that way, everybody knows going into a battle exactly what the situation is, what we’re fighting for, the degree to which the facts might counsel compromise or not, and the degree to which our collective credibility should be put on the line.”
Open Thread
Now the threads I've sang don't add much weight to the story in my head so I'm thinking I should go and write a punch line.
But We're Special!
Not really sure I agree with everything in here, but Kinsley discusses the media's belief in its own intrinsic specialness.
The Source
Reader b points to this rather important tidbit in the Times article that I missed last night:
Unclear what "not believed to work at the White House" means - does this exclude former employees?
It is still not publicly known who first told the columnist Robert D. Novak the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson. Mr. Novak identified her in a column on July 14, 2003, using her maiden name, Valerie Plame. Mr. Fitzgerald knows the identity of this source, a person who is not believed to work at the White House, the lawyers said.
Unclear what "not believed to work at the White House" means - does this exclude former employees?
Journamalism
Incredible. Almost identical paragraphs appearing in unsigned editorials across the country. Someone convene a panel on blogger ethics, quick!
Judy Judy Judy
Jay Rosen on Judy's shifting stories on, and the Times' inability to come clean about, her mystery double super secret security clerance.
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