Judith Miller Controversy

The International Federation of Journalists today accused Time-Warner, one of the world’s largest media corporations of a "profound betrayal" of principle over its decision to publicly defy its reporter’s wishes and hand over his notebook to avoid heavy fines in a court action over protection of sources. Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine was ready to go to jail for refusing to name a...

Washington, June 30, 2005–Restrictive regimes around the world came out ahead. Many were already taking a cue from a U.S. case involving the leak of a CIA officer's name when the Supreme Court announced this week that it would not hear an appeal by two journalists. The reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of The New York Times, face 18-month jail terms for not revealing...

Philip Meyer, who has studied the newspaper industry for three decades, can see the darkness at the end of the tunnel. If present readership trends continue indefinitely, says the University of North Carolina professor, the last daily newspaper reader will check out in 2044. October 2044, to be exact. "I use that as an attention-getting device," says Meyer, whose latest book, "The Vanishing...

Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper's 6-year-old son doesn't read the New York Times or watch C-SPAN, so as Christmas approached he remained blissfully ignorant that his father faced up to 18 months in jail for refusing to reveal his confidential sources. While a three-judge federal appeals court panel in Washington weighed whether the First Amendment and legal precedent bestow a "reporter's...

In November 1969 Paul Branzburg, a twenty-eight-year-old reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, spent a few days hanging out with two local men for a story about how they planned to clear $5,000 making and selling a batch of hashish. The resulting article, THE HASH THEY MAKE ISN'T TO EAT, ran in the paper’s November 15 edition. In it Branzburg, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia...

As the war in Iraq has turned into a grueling occupation, the question of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction persists. To investigate that question, there would seem to be no better-qualified reporter on Earth than Judith Miller of the New York Times. Miller is a genuine expert on weapons of mass destruction or, in Washington parlance, WMD. She has written important books about Saddam...