There’s a lot to unpack in Bill Keller’s quasi-demi-mea culpa. Consider:
I wish we had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD as soon as I became executive editor. At the time, we thought we had compelling reasons for kicking the issue down the road. The paper had just been through a major trauma, the Jayson Blair episode, and needed to regain its equilibrium. It felt somehow unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors. I was trying to get my arms around a huge new job, appoint my team, get the paper fully back to normal, and I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction.
Based on this last sentence alone, Keller needs to go. Immediately. An executive at a newspaper whose aversion to confrontation leads him to characterize grotesquely incorrect information printed in his extremely influential newspaper, information which is passed on to and bylined by not a journalist but by an enthusiastic stenograper-slash-cheerleader, in this flippant way, needs to walk away.
But wait! There’s more:
I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own.
When I read this sentence I nearly fell out of my chair. You mean to tell me that a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and the newsroom’s star pony is called to testify in a highly-publicized case and her boss doesn’t sit her down to chat beforehand? Shocking. Seriously.
And then:
Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn’t know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (In November of 2003 Phil Taubman tried to ascertain whether any of our correspondents had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper....
..if I had known the details of Judy’s entanglement with Libby, I’d have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises.
How great is the use of the word "entanglement" in this graf? A word so loaded with possible alternative meanings.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Judy. You’re done.
Kurtz has this intriguing and puzzling information to offer today:
Miller’s refusal to be interviewed by the Times until about 24 hours before the paper’s deadline for the Sunday paper meant, as the New York Observer has reported, that about 250,000 copies were printed without the 6,000-word news story.
Bennett said he forcefully argued against Miller’s accompanying first-person piece about her dealings with Libby because "it could affect the criminal prosecution" of senior administration officials who may have outed Plame as working for the CIA as part of a campaign against her husband, a White House critic. Such an article also "would antagonize the prosecutor, Mr. Fitzgerald," Bennett said."At one point Judy agreed to do what I recommended. But she was under tremendous pressure by the New York Times to write the story" as a condition of her employment.
While Keller and Abramson argued that the Times had a responsibility to level with its readers once Miller was no longer in legal jeopardy, Bennett contended that the waiver from Libby and agreement with Fitzgerald applied only to Miller’s grand jury testimony and not to telling the world about her private conversations with Cheney’s top aide. If revealing everything to readers "were the trumping principle," Bennett said, "you shouldn’t respect confidential sources." It is not illegal, however, for grand jury witnesses to discuss their testimony.
I ask you, why would Judy’s lawyer insist that publishing her first-person account of her dealings with Libby would "affect the criminal prosecution" of senior administration officials? One would think that her grand jury testimony, if truthful, would have done the job quite effectively, if a criminal act were to be revealed. After all, wouldn’t her account in the Times merely be a wrapup of what she’d already said under oath? And why would such an article "antagonize the prosecutor", if she were merely recounting her testimony? And if there were any legal repercussions that could negatively impact the Times, don’t you think the paper’s lawyers would have put the kebosh on such a piece being published?
And for a report on what Times insiders are thinking, go over to Gilliard’s place and check out his analysis of the Dowd column.
Also, please note Dowd’s comparison of Judy to Becky Sharp. For those of you whose memory of William Thackeray’s main character in his classic work Vanity Fair is a little rusty, here’s a refresher:
None of the novel’s characters is more memorable than Becky Sharp, one of Victorian literature’s most remarkable creations. While Thackeray’s narrator takes pains to expose Becky’s subterfuges and to insinuate sexual immorality and even murder, we cannot help but admire her intelligence and élan. Alone among the novel’s major characters, she is not content to live out the life she was born into—that of a governess. Lacking money and family, she uses the only tools at her disposal, sex and cunning, to seek advancement in the world. Her success in gaining entrée to society’s most exclusive circles, despite the hostility of her husband’s family and a chronic lack of cash, is a testament to Becky’s audacity and brilliance, her ultimate downfall notwithstanding.
Ouch.
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Judy: The gift that keeps on giving