Disgraced NYT media whore Judy Miller is back, and she's mad about being singled out for being wrong about Iraq

Feel free to watch if you like. I don't want to, and thanks to Erik Wemple's vigilance, I don't have to.

"If that consensus was wrong, I think you can’t blame either reporters for reporting what the consensus was or the intelligence analysts who got it wrong."

-- former NYT dimwit Judith Miller, in her book

by Ken

There's ample reason to feel general gratitude to washingtonpost.com's Erik Wemple for the watchful eye the Erik Wemple Blog keeps on the hamsters who turn the wheels in their cages to power the infotainment noozemedia. But there are times when I have to positively bless the man. Like now, when it means he's got his eye on the likes of former NYT noozemonger Judy Miller, meaning I don't have to.

You'd have to have achieved an even higher level of obliviousness that I've managed in order to not be aware that our Judy is Out There, just this close to being Among Us -- so close, she's almost within spitting range. But of course she's too smart to get that close, even now when she has to pretend to care what we think because at the moment she has, in case you hadn't guessed, a book to flog.

We'll come back to the Erik Wemple Blog report in a moment. First let's quickly dispose of the preposterous argument embodied in the the line I've put at the top of this post: "If that consensus was wrong, I think you can’t blame either reporters for reporting what the consensus was or the intelligence analysts who got it wrong." As we'll see in a moment, our Judy places great stock in That Consensus (I'm surprised she isn't capping the phrase herself); it seems to be what grounds her reality.

Which is why she's crap as a reporter, because a serious reporter, especially of the elite kind our Judy pretended to be, is supposed to be interested, not in That Consensus but in The Reality. Contrary to the claims we're about to hear her make, That Consensus, far from having never been wrong, has probably hardly ever been right if you take the trouble to look closely enough. The only difference in the case of the mess that That Consensus made of "Come Invade Me" Iraq is that That Consensus was so hugely and visibly and disastrously wrong.

We can chatter a bit more afterward, but now let's turn the floor over to EW (lotsa links onsite):

Judith Miller tells Bill Maher she ‘couldn’t have been more skeptical’ in pre-Iraq war coverage

By Erik Wemple

As HBO comedian Bill Maher noted on his program Friday night [see the YouTube clip up top], former New York Times reporter Judith Miller has served as the spokeswoman for all the various journalists who screwed up the WMD coverage prior to the 2003 launch of the Iraq war against Saddam Hussein. “I take your point when you say you were singled out,” said Maher in an interview with Miller.

That said, Miller has trouble renouncing the credulous pieces that bore her byline in the run-up to the war. Asked by Maher whether she would have been more skeptical about the claims from the Bush administration and others, Miller insisted: “I couldn’t have been more skeptical. I was more skeptical. Every time I got information that contradicted something that we had reported, I went back and did a second story, sometimes a third story.” Miller left the Times in 2005 after her bizarre involvement in the I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby case.

Why is Miller talking with Maher about WMD 12 years after the fact? To promote her new book, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey, in which the reporter lashes back at her many critics. “Relying on the conclusions of American and foreign intelligence analysts and other experts I trusted, I, too, got WMD in Iraq wrong. But not because I lacked skepticism or because senior officials spoon-fed me a line,” Miller writes.

Maher’s program, Real Time With Bill Maher, proved somewhat hospitable to Miller’s self-rehab project. “The New York Times was not alone. Almost every paper in the country was reporting this,” Miller said to Maher. “But beyond that, this information was coming from the men and women who had gotten Osama bin Laden right, who understood that the country was vulnerable to a biological weapons attack. I was relying on those same sources. They had never lied to me, they were usually right, we had lots of qualifiers in the story.”

Another point: There was a consensus behind the intelligence, said Miller. “If that consensus was wrong, I think you can’t blame either reporters for reporting what the consensus was or the intelligence analysts who got it wrong,” said Miller in the interview. “Though, I wanted to go back and say, ‘How did this happen?’ That’s why I wrote the book — how did this happen, how did they get it so wrong?”

The pages of The Story betray any such motivation. Far from reading like an attempt to inquire how the prewar Iraq intelligence was off, the book’s thrust takes on the narrower imperative of contextualizing and defending its author’s role in the whole mess.

Speaking of which, Miller’s discussion of an intelligence “consensus” omits her own role in cementing it. On Dec. 20, 2001, for example, Miller wrote about the claims of Iraqi defector Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, who said that “he had personally visited at least 20 different sites that he believed to have been associated with Iraq’s chemical or biological weapons programs.” A number of other incriminating details about Hussein’s WMD programs spill from the story.

What happened to this Miller exclusive? It got footnoted in a version of a White House background report on WMD, titled “A Decade of Deception and Defiance.”

When you write for the New York Times, you can never shrink from your role in bringing about a “consensus.”

JUST A FEW THINGS --

About our Judy being "singled out"

No, this isn't going to fly. You can't go around with your nose sniffing the heavens and your feet resolutely refusing to touch the ground in consequence of your journalistic divinity as an elite sage of the NYT, privileged with a galaxy of "inside" sources, only to shrink back to "Gosh, I'm just one little reporter" when the you-know-what hits the fan. For example, how many of those other reporters who got it wrong were helped in getting it wrong by editors who kept beating them over the head with our Judy's NYT reports? The fact is, those other reporters have taken some heat for getting it wrong. Not as much as they should have, but our Judy's got no beef for taking something closer to the amount of heat she deserved.

In fact, there were reporters who got it right

Again, they haven't gotten anything like the credit they deserved for getting it right, but unlike our Judy, those braver and more competent reporters didn't go along with That Consensus, and were generally reviled for it. They may not have accounted for a large percentage of the infotainment noozers, but they were hardly insignificant in number. I get the impression that our Judy isn't paying any more attention to those people now than she did back when they, unlike her, were ferchrissakes doing their effing job. I mean, how smart did you have to be to know that every word that came from everyone connected to, or merely in agreement with, the likes of "Big Dick" Cheney and "Chimpy the Prez" Bush was lying, or at least likely to be woefully misinformed. Let me say once again: There were plenty of people at the time screaming that we werre being lied to.

Is any of this included in our Judy's book supposedly exploring how That Consensus got it so miserably, diastrously wrong? From what Erik says, I'm guessing no way, Jose.

Say what?

Our Judy one more time, slower:

"If that consensus was wrong, I think you can't blame either reporters for reporting what the consensus was or the intelligence analysts who got it wrong."

What? Forget the reporters for a moment; of course we can blame them. (By the way, did they ever mention to their readers and viewers that they weren't "reporting" reality but That Consensus?) She can't possibly have meant to say that we can't blame the intelligence analysts who got it wrong, can she?

What am I missing here? Isn't blaming the intelligence analysts who got it wrong -- or at least taking a mighty close look at their work -- one of the first things we should have been doing? (Of course there were also plenty of intelligence analysts who didn't get it wrong but were bullied into silence by thugs like Big Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, busily hammering their consensus into submission. But then, even now our Judy doesn't seem to know anything about this.)

Say, doesn't our Judy's worship of That Consensus
have a familiar ring?

Anytime That Consensus is put to the test, doesn't it come up smelling really bad? Just a couple of examples:

• Wasn't there a That Consensus about our involvement in Vietnam -- both our reasons for being there and the glorious job our forces and our stalwart South Vietnamese allies were doing?

• And when our Judy yammers about the unimpeachable wisdom of That Consensus, isn't this just the sort of thing that a couple of young metro reporters named Woodward and Bernstein heard from the wise old hands above them at the Washington Post all through their Watergate coverage?

After Woodward and Bernstein cracked the case, it was abundantly clear that the job could only have been done by reporters who had no stake in That Consensus, who didn't get any rewards from it and didn't owe it anything. Of course that young Woodward fellow went on to become a pillar of That Consensus, establishing a brand as manufacturer of his very own version of it. But that's another story.

Or is it maybe the same story?

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