Source Protection

In a recent e-mail chat about the future of their business, several young New York Times reporters concluded with dismay that most of their friends don't subscribe to the newspaper. At the San Jose Mercury News, hardened news hawks facing staff reductions have begun eyeing public relations jobs they once would have disdained. In Philadelphia, a news photographer who has "loved every minute" of his...

IN an extraordinary memo on the Judith Miller affair sent to the New York Times staff late Friday afternoon, the paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, did something far more important than admit errors and explain why they occurred. He took the focus of this lacerating incident off the Times' internal workings as a media institution and put it squarely where it belongs: on Miller, the individual...

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 not...

More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, a few years later, she's facing heightened scrutiny in the aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on Oct. 16 -- a lengthy investigative piece about Miller plus her own first-person account of how she got entangled in the case of the Bush...

The long-awaited "explanations"–one from the New York Times and another from the newspaper’s senior correspondent Judith Miller–about what led her to go to jail rather than testify before a federal grand jury, and then testify 85 days later, have raised more questions than answers. The Times’ page one news story and Miller’s "personal account" published Sunday portray behavior that has far more in...

Two years ago a scandal involving a rogue reporter called Jayson Blair plunged the New York Times into a crisis that triggered the removal of its editor, his deputy and a painful period of self-examination. Now the Times faces another scandal involving another favoured reporter and is enduring a similar bout of self-criticism. Some media critics and even Times staff members fear the fall-out could...

NEW YORK -- With a ferociousness usually reserved for presidents caught lying to the public, the journalism world has turned on The New York Times and its reporter Judith Miller, who only weeks ago was being lauded for going to jail to protect a source. A few media critics and academics suggested Monday that the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter should be fired for her actions covering the search...

WASHINGTON -- The anguish among New York Times staffers over the paper's handling of the Judith Miller saga has mounted in recent days, much to the consternation of its top executives. "Of course I'm concerned by the very palpable frustration in the newsroom," Executive Editor Bill Keller said yesterday. "I share it. It's excruciating to have a story and not be able to tell it, and annoying to be...

In July 2003, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, created a firestorm by publishing an essay in The New York Times that accused the Bush administration of using faulty intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. The administration, he charged, ignored findings of a secret mission he had undertaken for the Central Intelligence Agency - findings, he said, that undermined claims that Iraq was...

In a notebook belonging to Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, amid notations about Iraq and nuclear weapons, appear two small words: "Valerie Flame." Ms. Miller should have written Valerie Plame. That name is at the core of a federal grand jury investigation that has reached deep into the White House. At issue is whether Bush administration officials leaked the identity of Ms. Plame...