Bad blood at the New York Times

BY dasu k| IN Media Practice | 29/10/2005
The New York Post described the scene at the Times as all-out civil war. The gossip is that the Times used Maureen Dowd to disclose the publisher’s mind.
 

 

Dasu Krishnamoorty

 

 

Valeri Plame is not news, nor is Karl Rove or Scooter Libby. The news is former friends, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Judith Miller, are fighting each other with weapons of self-destruction. Each has destroyed the other. Naturally, the neocons are celebrating.  Revolts have broken out in the Times newsrooms. News about them is official now after three of the Times staffers wrote a two-page article on October 16, followed by a column from its public editor Byron Calame. Keeping company with the two-page article was a personal account by Judith Miller of her testimony before the grand jury. All this might look like an exercise in transparency and assertion of editorial autonomy but all that is now eclipsed by how the other media and blogs saw it: entertainment. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post said that he had "never seen anything quite like this before." This is a story that the Times cannot wish away.

After the public editor’s column came one of Times’ senior columnists Maureen Dowd’s assessment of Miller as a woman of mass destruction. She referred to what she thought was the reporter’s tropism toward powerful men and complained that she (Miller) needed to be editorially leashed but unfortunately ‘she was kept on no leash at all.’ According to Newsweek, "Now many Times staffers are out for blood. At a contentious meeting in the paper`s Washington bureau last week, some reporters and editors demanded Miller`s dismissal." There is one sentence in Dowd’s column that strengthens this line. She wrote, "She never knew when to quit."

The gossip is that the Times has used Maureen Dowd to disclose the publisher’s mind. Some indication of this was available in a report the Wall Street Journal carried: "New York Times reporter Judith Miller has begun discussing her future employment options with the newspaper, including the possibility of a severance package, a lawyer familiar with the matter, said yesterday. The negotiations began with a face-to-face meeting Monday morning between Ms. Miller and the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., said the lawyer familiar with the situation."

The New York Newspaper Guild is bracing itself to intervene on behalf of Judith Miller. "If it ever comes to the point where anything specific is talked about, we have to be involved," said Barry Lipton, president of the Guild, which represents Times editorial employees. "We are the legal bargaining unit." The New York Observer contended that the discussions at the Times offices centered on how much severance Miller would receive, what space, if any, she might get in the paper to write a response to critics, and if her departure would be the subject of a joint announcement with the paper.

These are happy times for the conservative press which readily offered its shoulder to Miller. In an editorial, the New York Post described the scene at the Times as all-out civil war. The Post has its own theory on why long-time friends are parting ways. Its editorial said, "First and foremost, the "Dump on Judy" movement - both within and outside the Times - seems based not on her behavior but rather the left’s continued fury over articles she wrote about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction." Another conservative columnist said that nothing like this had ever happened before in the annals of American journalism.

 

The Times onslaught began on a Sunday (October 16} with a story of how Miller rode roughshod over the reporters and editors of the world’s most powerful newspaper, overshadowing Jayson Blair’s saga of deception and journalistic fraud. The newspaper published this sordid tale of its own embarrassment on two consecutive Sundays. The following Sunday, the paper’s public editor Byron Calame, fulfilling a promise made to readers, reviewed how Judith Miller had played havoc with the freedom that publisher Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller gave her and how the latter two deferentially put up with her excesses. Their silence amounted to connivance.

 

The October 16 story was written by Times staffers Don Van Natto Jr., Adam Liptak and Clifford Levy. Nearly everyone barring the reporters comes off poorly from the two pages devoted to explaining how Judith Miller’s stories got past skeptical editors. It is the Blair drama re-enacted at a higher level and with greater élan. The main article the three staffers wrote threw light on the unprofessional facets of Miller’s personality and her recourse to evasive strategies. The story said the Times had turned her case into a cause but in the end, "neither the Times nor its cause has emerged unbruised."

 

More importantly, the report showed how the Miller case created fissures in the editorial department and the inability and frustration of the reporters to report on a case involving their own paper. Asked what she regretted about the Times’ handling of the matter, one of the managing editors, Jill Abramson, said, "The entire thing." Roger Cohen, foreign editor at the time of her reports on WMDs, told Miller that there was unease, discomfort and unhappiness over some of her coverage. Inside the newsroom, according to the report her own colleagues wrote, she was a divisive figure and several colleagues refused to work with her.

 

An editor to whom Miller was accountable found her very pushy and operating with a lot of autonomy rare at the Times. Another editor in charge of investigative reporting recalled how she had described herself as Miss Run Amok. Asked to elaborate, she told him that she could do whatever she wanted. This, in fact, has hurt the paper and its trust with readers. She more than earned her sobriquet "Miss Run Amok." A Seattle editor commented, "Her cooperation with Times reporters left a lot to be desired. In a larger sense, she seemed to be operating with no control and you get the sense that she really called her own tune."

 

Inside the newsrooms tensions began rising as the editors were reluctant to permit reporters to cover other aspects of the case like how the prosecutor was investigating the case. An article some of the Times’ Washington bureau reporters wrote was not published. Douglas Jehl and David Johnston sent a memo to the bureau chief Philip Taubman listing ideas for the coverage of the case. Taubman told them that Keller did not want the ideas to be pursued because of the risk of provoking the prosecutor while Miller was in jail. The October 16 report recalled how the Times published 15 editorials on the subject and linked it to Sulzberger being in charge of the edit page.

 

Public editor Calame found fault with the journalistic practices of both Judith Miller and the editors at the Times. It is clear from the joint article and Calame’s column that both Bill Keller and Sulzberger had indulged Miller for reasons not known so far. Keller is now trying the impossible: extricating himself from the mess. The public editor was very critical about the publisher’s deference to Miller and said that it needed to be addressed more openly. There is an undisguised internal revolt in the newsrooms, evidence of which was available from the Oct.16 article.  Editors and reporters are pressing for the exit of Keller and Miller. The latter went on leave after her testimony before the grand jury and said she would be back soon. That now seems a remote possibility.

 

The public editor was intrigued by Miller’s claim that she had a government security clearance. That meant a restriction on her to share information with NYT’s editors. But in her personal account, she said that what she had signed was a nondisclosure form with some modifications. This, according to her, permitted her to reveal information only to Howell and Boyd. Retired CBS News correspondent Bill Lynch said the scandal was Judith Miller`s revelation that she was granted a Defense Department security clearance while embedded with the WMD search team in Iraq. "This is as close as one can get to government licensing of journalists and the New York Times -- if it knew -- should never have allowed her to become so compromised," he wrote.

From all these articles Judith Miller, a long-time friend of Sulzberger, emerges as the villain who misled those who stood by her. Though the publisher and executive editor Bill Keller, who waited on her, try to distance themselves from Miller whose reports destroyed the credibility of world’s number one newspaper and as some people believe helped Bush going to war with Iraq, there are few takers for this line. But nobody is clear about why Miller should be sacked. She thrived because Sulzberger and Keller allowed her to do so. They seem to live down the embarrassment by making Miller a scapegoat. In the process,the  Times has lost its shine.  

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