From thenation
Media corporations are arguably the most important yet least examined centers of power in our society. The owners of the Fourth Estate have a unique ability to direct the searchlight of inquiry upon others while remaining powerfully positioned to deflect it from themselves.That is the blunt message of the belated but devastating report in Sunday's New York Times on how the paper turned reporter Judith Miller's "case into a cause." In its zeal to present its own discredited reporter as a First Amendment hero, the "paper of record" badly neutered its news department's coverage of the Miller saga and deployed its editorial page as a battering ram in her defense, publishing fifteen editorials supporting Miller's protection of her White House source.
"The Times...limited its own ability to cover aspects of one of the biggest scandals of the day," concluded the front-page article. "Even as the paper asked for the public's support, it was unable to answer its questions."
The paper, led by publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., waged a nonstop public crusade not just to protect Miller in the courts but to make her an outright heroine--obscuring the fact that she was not protecting the public's right to know but was abetting the Bush Administration in its shameless and possibly criminal attempt to discredit a whistle-blower. That whistle-blower, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, had enraged the Administration by exposing its use of faked WMD evidence as justification for invading Iraq.
For reasons that are still murky (and which are not made clearer by her own lengthy statement printed in the same edition), Miller argues that a waiver signed last year by Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, was not good enough to allow her to testify and that simply asking Libby point-blank whether he had signed the waiver willingly would have been somehow unethical.
