Judith Miller Controversy

4 November 2005

'WSJ' Seeks 8 Pages of Redacted Info in Judith Miller Case

NEW YORK: The Wall Street Journal 's parent company is seeking to expose sensitive material relating to Judith Miller of The New York Times in court. The Journal's editorial page revealed today that Dow Jones & Co., this newspaper's parent company, filed a motion late Wednesday requesting that the federal district court unseal the infamous eight pages of redacted information that the special...

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1 November 2005

US media in a conundrum over juicy scandal

The old joke asks what do you do when the only way to save an endangered species is to feed the animal endangered plants. The serious question is what do you do when the only way to protect freedom of the press is to kill the biggest story of your career. This Solomonic stumper arose last weekend when an independent US prosecutor charged the top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney with perjury. The...

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1 November 2005

What Judy Forgot: Your Right to Know

The most intriguing revelation of Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's news conference last week was his assertion that he would have presented his indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby a year ago if not for the intransigence of reporters who refused to testify before the grand jury. He said that without that delay, "we would have been here in October 2004 instead of October 2005." Had that...

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31 October 2005

The Media: Miller's Crossing

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...

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29 October 2005

Novel Strategy Pits Journalists Against Source

In pressing his indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., the special prosecutor is pitting three prominent journalists against their former source, a strategy that experts in law and journalism say has rarely been used or tested. It is all but unheard of for reporters to turn publicly on their sources or for prosecutors to succeed in conscripting members of a profession that prizes its independence. Yet...

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28 October 2005

Off Message: Get Happy

All is woe and darkness in the house of media. If you were measuring journalists' public standing on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best, right now we're in less-than-zero territory, thanks to The New York Times and its dodgy handling of the Plame spy case. A few days ago, as the entire politico-media establishment was on 24-hour indictment watch, The New York Sun reported that widespread...

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27 October 2005

Mainstream media myopia on the First Amendment

Here in media world, we're all quite cross at The New York Times and its former star reporter, Judith Miller. She is widely believed to have sought her martyrdom as a career move. And then she gave up after a mere couple of months in jail. What a wuss! And the Times: this great institution let a mere reporter lead it around by its nose, with predictable results. What a superwuss! But this latest...

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24 October 2005

NY Times, Miller Fight Over CIA Leak Probe

WASHINGTON -- In the latest fallout from the CIA leak investigation, reporter Judith Miller and The New York Times are engaging in a very public fight about her seeming lack of candor in the case. In a memo to the staff, Executive Editor Bill Keller says Miller "seems to have misled" the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, who said Miller told him in the fall of 2003 that she was...

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24 October 2005

Miss Run Amok stirs up a storm at America's most famous paper

Civil war erupted at America's most famous newspaper yesterday, with senior staff exchanging public recriminations over the actions of a controversial reporter nicknamed "Miss Run Amok". The reader representative of The New York Times, a senior figure in the paper's hierarchy, roundly criticised both its editor and its publisher for their "deference" to the reporter, Judith Miller. Ms Miller...

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24 October 2005

Colleagues assail 'Times' reporter

As the White House waits to see whether any of its top officials will be indicted in connection with the leaking of a CIA officer's name, The New York Times is engaged in an extraordinary dispute with one of its reporters over her work on the story. "I've never seen anything quite like this," Los Angeles Times political writer Ron Brownstein said Sunday on CNN's Reliable Sources. Times reporter...

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