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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While Bank of America chases its tail in fear of WikiLeaks, Judy Miller (yes, Judy Miller!) declares Julian Assange a bad journalist

I ventured the other day that Judy Miller still sees herself as the victim in the implosion of her career as star national-security correspondent of the NYT. Now that she's in the bosom of Fox Noise and Newsmax, it's an easier fantasy to maintain, but it's still a fantasy.

by Ken

Sometimes you learn more from what a news "report" doesn't report than what it does. Case in point: a report by the New York Times's Nelson D. Schwartz on the red-alert security lockdown instituted by Bank of America since it emerged as the rumored target of Julian Assange's documentary ace-in-the-hole, in the event that he needs to protect himself from official inquisitions. Assange has never said this, exactly, but he did once say that he had a hard drive that had belonged to a BoA executive, and more recently he has said that he has deposited these unspecified documents to be released in the event that he feels the need for protection.

If you're Bank of America, you put two and two together, and you get trouble. Now I understand that in such a situation it's mere prudence on the part of a major corporation that finds itself in such a threatened position to take whatever investigative and/or protective action it can think of. Surely we can't expect such entities to sit dumbly and wait for the safe drop on them.

Still, there's something awfully curious about the nature of the Bank of America panic-mode inquiry, at least as reported by Nelson Schwartz, from whom we get the image of an investigation that resembles nothing so much as a preemptive version of those Executive Branch inquisitions Richard Nixon used to instigate every time inconvenient truths found their way into the enemy hands of the media.

[A] team of 15 to 20 top Bank of America officials, led by the chief risk officer, Bruce R. Thompson, has been overseeing a broad internal investigation — scouring thousands of documents in the event that they become public, reviewing every case where a computer has gone missing and hunting for any sign that its systems might have been compromised.

In addition to the internal team drawn from departments like finance, technology, legal and communications, the bank has brought in Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm, to help manage the review. It has also sought advice from several top law firms about legal problems that could arise from a disclosure, including the bank’s potential liability if private information was disclosed about clients.

The company’s chief executive, Brian T. Moynihan, receives regular updates on the team’s progress, according to one Bank of America executive familiar with the team’s work, who, like other bank officials, was granted anonymity to discuss the confidential inquiry.

I suppose this is reasonable enough in its way. What intrigues me is that the only question the BoA "risk" team seems to be pursuing is: Where in the company might there be security breaches? How might the dastards have gotten access to documents of ours? Or, in other words, could we have a Bradley Manning? What I don't see in the NYT account is any speculation or even curiosity about what kind of dirt about BoA WikiLeaks might be sitting on.

I mean, isn't that what we're all wondering?

I can think of four theories to explain this:

(1) The only reason BoA is so freaked is that in a company that size, there are bound to be documents that, ripped out of context, can be made to look incriminating, however innocent or explicable. Therefore the key is trying to ascertain whether there is in fact a leak and then, you know, sort of deal with it, somehow.

(2) BoA has concerns about the contents of the hypothetical documents, but the condition of the NYT reporter's access to its team was that he not talk about stuff they don't want him to talk about.

(3) The BoA high command has some pretty good ideas of what could be among the documents, and is scared shitless.

(4) If you look into the inner workings of BoA, there's so much potentially damaging crud that the high command scarcely knows where to begin being afraid.

I'm sure that most Village types gravitate to (1). I don't entertain this for a moment. It would be pretty shameful to contemplate (2), but I don't rule it out. Maybe it's my suspicious nature, especially where a behemoth like BoA is concerned (I have my petty but well-founded grievances against it, but this isn't the place to go into that), I just assume we're dealing with either (3) or (4). So I entertain the fantasy that some high-level BoA moguls are going to be doing time.


MEANWHILE, IN THE "JUDY IN WONDERLAND"
FANTASY LAND THAT IS OUR JUDY'S BRAIN --

At some point you't think Judy Miller would get the message: Keep your big trap shut; everything you say is subject to catcalls. From the "You Can't Make This Stuff Up" Dept. comes this story, as written up by Jack Mirkinson's for HuffPost:

Former New York Times reporter Judy Miller criticized Julian Assange on Saturday's "Fox News Watch," calling the WikiLeaks chief a "bad journalist" for not verifying the veracity of the stories he publishes.

Miller said that Assange "didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it could hurt anyone."

Of course, Miller is most famous (or infamous) for writing stories about Iraq's non-existent weapons program that proved to be false, and that influenced public opinion about the need to invade Iraq. As Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now" and Crooks and Liars both noted, Miller has previously said the exact opposite of what she criticized Assange for. Author Michael Massing quotes Miller as saying that it is not her job to verify the truth of the stories her government sources are giving her:

"[M]y job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal."

It's always unfortunate when you find yourself in need of feeling embarrassed for someone else. But our Judy seems incapable of the embarrassment she has earned. The only way she can credibly talk about journalistic propriety is by illustrating her points with reference to the many ways she got it wrong in her NYT career.

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The Judy Miller case: If the corporatist elite doesn't take care of its own, how will it recruit and maintain future stooges?

Did it ever occur to Judy Miller in her career as a Village media whore that she deserved to lose the reputation you'd think would be what matters most to an actual journalist?

by Ken

In my post earlier today, "So where are the jobs? (And are they coming back?," in which I had occasion to ridicule media whore Michael Gerson for his puppylike servitude to his corporate masters, I tried not to overlook how important it is to the corporatist elite to maintain a faithful roster of bought-and-paid-for whores in both government and media service.

Incidentally, I realize how crazy-paranoid it is to be talking, as I find myself increasingly, about a conspiracy of corporate-elite types, but I don't see any way around it, since it seems to me to describe the reality we now live in: "Money talks; no money, fuck you." "Oligarchy" seems to me an excellent description of where we are, but that seems to me to sound even crazier-paranoider.

And crucial to the operation of the corporatist whore-networks is the assurance the whores have to have that they'll be taken care of. I'm sure, for example, that President Obama very much wants to be elected to a second term. At the same time, though, I have a strong feeling that policy-wise his thinking includes a powerful understanding that as long as he provides the service his corporate bankrollers expected of him, as long as he goes down fighting for them, he'll be taken care of. It will cost them only chump change to take care of one of their own, and doing so provides reassurance to all the other people they'll be buying, while failing to do so would send a terrible message to all their other stooges, present and future.

Of course the employer of last resort in the media-whore wing of corporatist stoogedom is Fox Noise. However, there are limits to how many refugees from factuality the NewsCorp empire can absorb, and even those openings really require some kind of bona fides in TV -- not that it takes much more than an ability to talk crazy on camera.

Fans of larger-than-life media whores will be pleased to know that after a rough patch, one of their titans has found a new home. Yes, Judith Miller, who wangled her way into the upper echelon of New York Times reporters in order to create a personal empire in which, as national-security correspondent, she could promote her both her personal foreign-policy agenda and her bloated and diseased ego, only to see it fizzle when she was caught as essentially a coconspirator of Irving "Lewis" Libby and the rest of the elite pondscum in Vice President "Big Dick" Cheney's entourage in the matter of the outing of Valerie Plame and the subsequent cover-up of it.

I'm not privy to what travails our Judy may have endured in the effort to, er, resell her services following her discreet separation from the usually unembarrassable NYT. That she disappeared from the active roster of media whores seemed blessing enough. Well, she's ba-a-ack! As HuffPost media watcher Jason Linkins reported yesterday: "Judith Miller Lands At Newsmax."

Now, as it happens, and as Jason points out, our Judy was already a Fox Noise contributor. And "she has already served as an online contributor" for Newsmax. But now she's a published Newsmax writer. That this development has given rise to what Jason describes as "a stir on the Tweetdecks of American journalists" is a measure of the length of the leap from the NYT to Newsmax. And here one has to wonder at the extremity of Jason's tact in describing Newsmax as "right-leaning." A festering cesspool of extreme-right-wing news-bending is closer to how most of us would describe it.

Jason reports that our Judy's maiden Newsmax voyage, "Terrorism, Money, and Drugs," --

is a perfectly decent read on the law enforcement effort being jointly undertaken by Americans and Iraqis to curb the drug trafficking that's fueling what's left of the insurgency. Assuming it doesn't have the sourcing problems of her pre-war work at the Times (again, I am referring to her history of using the Bush administration's favorite grifter-shills as her "sources"), there's nothing objectionable about the piece itself.

The problem is that she's earned herself such an unseemly reputation as a media whore. The sin isn't being a media whore, which after all is what nearly the entire employment rolls of the infotaiinment noozemedia are. No, the sin is getting caught being a media whore. After all, she was hardly alone in writing what Jason calls "hilariously wrong pieces on Iraq's WMD program," pieces that --

were cited by Bush administration officials as a factor in their decision to invade Iraq (by design, considering international grifter-clown Ahmed Chalabi was telling Miller exactly what the Bush White House wanted her to hear: as Jack Shafer puts it, "Bush's guy was the Times's guy"),

How many of the others paid any sort of price for being "hilariously wrong"? I sure haven't heard about them. Mostly I've heard about people who were right being punished and people who were wrong being rewarded.

Looking back, what's really shocking is how little Judy seems to have tended to her reputation. I'm sure she was far from alone among the Village media whores in thinking she was burnishing her reputation by making herself a "player" in the stories she was (mis)covering. And you can forgive them all for thinking, based on experience and observation, that this is in fact the way the "journalistic" game is played. Probably to this day Judy thinks of herself as the victim in her career of journalistic malfeasance.

You have to wonder if it's ever dawned on our Judy that, short of a superhuman effort of rehabilitation, of a sort she shows no signs of having undertaken, no one with any sense will ever trust another word she reports. True, at Fox Noise and Newsmax it doesn't matter a whit. But I think she used to have, however erroneously, a very different image of herself as a "journalist."

It doesn't make up for all the other Village media whores who've gotten, and continue to get, away with journalistic murder, and sure, on a human level it's possible to feel sorry for the one that got caught. However, on the level of integrity and trust, those ancient relics of once-talked-about virtue, it counts for something that one of these SOBs got caught. She swims now with the "right-leaning" media fishes.

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