Oct. 31, 2005 issue - Judith Miller wanted a restful weekend. Days after her newspaper published a blistering account of her role in the Valerie Plame leak case, The New York Times reporter went home to tony Sag Harbor, N.Y. On the agenda: walks on the beach and playing with her dog. But as she opened up an e-mail last Friday afternoon from Times editor Bill Keller to the paper's employees, all those plans went out the window. Miller, Keller wrote, had "misled" editors about her involvement in a "whispering campaign" against Ambassador Joe Wilson and had perhaps become inappropriately "entangled" with Dick Cheney's chief of staff. The memo, which Miller called "seriously inaccurate," caught her off guard. "I didn't know it was coming," she told NEWSWEEK.
Nearly three years after Jayson Blair, America's newspaper of record is once again in crisis. When Miller refused to answer special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's questions about the Plame case, the Times leapt to her defense, calling her a First Amendment martyr as she spent 85 days in jail. But then Miller cut a deal with Fitzgerald, and the paper went on to run a devastating account of her testimony that made her look less like a crusading journalist than an administration plant. Worse, Keller and Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., an old friend of Miller's, admitted they knew little about her role in the story even as they were rallying behind her. Managing editor Jill Abramson, asked by her own reporters what she regretted about the paper's coverage of the Miller episode, replied, "The entire thing."
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. In private, some staffers argued the paper had to do more–sacking Keller or even somehow punishing Sulzberger, whose family controls the Times. "Judy took advantage of her relationship with the publisher," said one Times staffer who asked not to be identified because he feared losing his job. "The publisher should pay the price." (A Times spokesman declined to comment.)
Still, most of the venom is directed at Miller. Hours after Keller's memo hit IN boxes, the paper ran a column by op-ed star Maureen Dowd calling Miller a "woman of mass destruction." The next day, a column by public editor Byron Calame detailed the frustration of editors who'd worked with Miller. "These are the things you say to your girlfriend when you want her to break up with you," said one reporter who asked not to be identified because he did not want to speak for the Times. But Miller is, for now at least, standing firm. Late last week she told NEWSWEEK she had every intention of returning to work. She also did some digging of her own. "Are you hearing anything about Fitzgerald?" she asked, before quickly hanging up.
