From Davidcorn.com
I am now convinced that the assertion (made by me and others) that the New York Times's Miller mess is worse for the paper than the Jayson Blair fiasco is dead-on. After further pondering yesterday's "explanations" published by the Times--which I dissected below--I've concluded I went too easy on Miller and the Times. Let me note first that as someone who has been reading the Times since the age of 12, I do not root against the newspaper. And I had hoped that executive editor Bill Keller would pull the paper's nuts out of the Miller fire. But the articles published by the Times--a self-serving first-person piece by Miller and a long triple-bylined article on the "Miller case"--made the deep hole in which the paper finds itself even deeper.You have to wonder about the top managers of the Times. What were they thinking when they read these articles? Miller claims that someone told her about Valerie Plame six days before columnist Bob Novak outed former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife as an undercover CIA officer, but Miller adds she cannot remember who said that. This is awfully tough to believe. Any reporter scooped on a story--and Miller did say she considered herself scooped by Novak on this topic--would likely recall who had given them news-making information a few days earlier. As one smart reader wrote me:
What concerns me, as it does you, is her claim she cannot remember the source for her writing "Valerie Flame." That is the source who she defied a court order to protect. Her lawyer told [special prosecutor Patrick] Fitzgerald that she had no other source than Libby on her behalf when he asked him to limit his questioning to Libby. Was he speaking the truth? How could Judy say that if there was another source? Would a jury in a case of perjury believe she forgot the name of that person when the Novak story broke a week later?
