As you will recall, the NY Times’ "public editor," Byron (Barney) Calame, posted some very pointed comments in his web journal earlier this week. He made clear that he had lots of questions for Miller and for the paper’s top brass. Among them, he identified four of particular interest:
- Was Ms. Miller?s contact with the source she is protecting initiated and conducted in genuine pursuit of a news article for Times readers?
- Why didn?t she write an article?
- What kinds of notes are there and who has them?
- Why wasn?t she exploring a voluntary waiver from the source?
Here is the current state of the answers to those questions, based on the two articles that appeared on the NYT’s web site yesterday and in the print edition today:
- Sort of. According to Miller, she wanted to talk to Scooter Libby about why the WMD intelligence had been so wildly wrong, but Libby wanted to talk about Joseph Wilson. There is every indication that Miller went along with what Libby wanted to do, to the point of agreeing to identify him (misleadingly) as a "former Hill staffer" rather than a "senior administration official."
- She says she urged an unnamed "editor" to let her write an article. However, Jill Abramson, the Washington bureau chief at the time and now a managing editor, says she didn’t. Either someone is lying, or Miller is being very cagey indeed about which "editor" she was talking to – she refused to discuss her conversations with her editors, even though there is no possible claim of journalistic privilege with respect to those conversations. Did she try to go over Abramson’s head to executive editor Bill Keller, or even to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.?
- Miller has the notes, and she is refusing to let anyone, including the NYT reporters working on the story, look at them. Her notes therefore remain shrouded in mystery – in particular, the question of who first identified Wilson’s wife to her (when she noted her now famous misspelling "Valerie Flame") is unanswered. Miller says she doesn’t remember who it was (oh PUH-LEEZ), but she doesn’t think it was Libby because her "Flame" notation appears in a different section of her notebook. Which begs the obvious question: what section of her notebook does that notation appear in? Miller doesn’t tell us, and won’t let anyone else see her notes.
- She did explore a waiver, sort of, but not really. The account of the waiver negotiations is extraordinarily tortured – the lawyers disagree ferociously about what was actually said, and highly questionable inferences were being drawn at every turn (I plan to write more about this aspect of the story later). At the end of the day, the waiver question has not been answered even close to satisfactorily.
In short, Miller has refused to supply adequate answers to some of the most important questions about this whole affair, and the intrepid NYT reporters who wrote today’s story were unable to shed much light on them without her help. Let’s hope that Mr. Calame can dig out some real answers to his four questions in his promised October 23 discussion of the Miller story. The NYT’s readers deserve no less, and if the paper takes the job of "public editor" even remotely seriously, it will require all employees to cooperate fully with him, on pain of immediate dismissal.
