Wide Area News
Miller’s tale
by Russell Brown
A jailed New York Times journalist goes from hero to zero.
The culture of American journalism – unlike the earthier British strain -– has long been focused on heroes and high ideals. The US was home to the world’s first journalism schools, in Missouri and New York, and newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer helped found the latter in order to “recognise that journalism is one of the great and intellectual professions”. More recently, the investigative work of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate scandal inspired successive generations of journalists.
Sometimes, however, there is grit in the lens. When former FBI agent Mark Felt finally revealed himself this year as Watergate’s “Deep Throat” (in return for a substantial cheque from Vanity Fair magazine and an even bigger movie-rights deal), his family hailed him as an “American hero”. But the naming brought the Deep Throat legend to earth. Felt, it appeared, might have been acting out of pique at being passed over for promotion as much as out of duty to the nation.
This year’s elevation of New York Times reporter Judith Miller to hero status for her decision to serve jail time rather than give up her sources to the prosecutor investigating the “outing” of CIA agent Valerie Plame (allegedly to punish her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, who had accused the Bush administration of trumping up the case for war in Iraq) had a much shorter run.
Indeed, Miller had her detractors even as she went behind bars. They pointed out that she had previously been responsible for a series of stories in 2003 – largely drawn from unnamed officials – on Iraqi weapons programmes. Her paper eventually published a statement renouncing five of her stories.
The criticism of Miller grew after she agreed to testify to the grand jury investigating the Plame leak – thus getting herself out of jail – and it emerged that she had been given a waiver to testify (by her source on Plame’s identity, White House staffer Lewis “Scooter” Libby) even before she went to jail. What was she up to?
Debate reached a crescendo after the Times posted two stories in its Sunday edition. One was a first-person account by Miller of her grand-jury testimony that was characterised by some unusual lapses of memory and revealed that she had deliberately altered her description of Libby as an anonymous source in such a way as to mislead readers. The other was a long and unflinching story by other reporters at the paper, which painted a picture of Miller as a rogue reporter and her editors as credulous and ineffectual.
The following day, the Washington Post reported on something not in either of the Times stories: an internal memo from Miller’s former reporting partner that said, among other things, “I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct … She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her.”
Two days later, however, the Post’s own editorial column intoned against other journalists’ “rush to judgment” on Miller, pointing out that journalists frequently had to rely on anonymous sources. The same paper’s media columnist, Howard Kurtz, supposed that the Miller frenzy came down to the fact that “we’re re-fighting the [Iraq] war through this case”.
Yet surely there is a difference between protecting a source offering information that the government of the day is trying to suppress and protecting a source delivering a message from the government of the day. The more that emerges about Miller, the more questions seem to be raised.
One thing that can safely be said at this distance is that it couldn’t happen here. For good or ill, the sheer reality of resources means that no reporter for a New Zealand news organisation would ever be given the kind of no-questions-asked autonomy that Miller enjoyed for so long at the New York Times.
It’s hard to grasp what disgraced Herald on Sunday reporter John Manukia thought he was doing when he fabricated an interview with former South Auckland policeman Anthony Solomona for his paper – still less how he thought he’d get away with it when his “exclusive” interview was to be splashed over two and a half pages.
Previous stories filed by Manukia for the HoS and the New Zealand Herald, largely covering crime and Pacific Island Affairs, offer few clues.
Police Minister Jack Elder got a sympathetic hearing from Manukia when he called for a return to corporal punishment in 1997. Was Manukia writing what he thought Solomona should have said, rather than the “clear and unambiguous apology” for his treatment of 17-year-old Angelo Turner that the former officer’s lawyer said he offered in court? Or did he simply feel under pressure to deliver a killer yarn?
The revelation that Maxim Institute director Bruce Logan used chunks of other people’s writing in opinion pieces submitted to the Press, the Otago Daily Times, the Northland Age and other newspapers ought to serve as a more general warning to editors that material submitted on behalf of a “think-tank” still needs scrutiny, both as to its provenance and the claims that it makes. It is tempting to conclude that Maxim escaped both forms of scrutiny largely because its name contained the magic word “institute”.
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