I know, I know: just shy of two months. But what a day.
I'll start by quoting the only astrologer I pay attention to, who told me last week:
I'm afraid I had to name you "Underachiever of the Month" for
September, Aries. You didn't quite succeed at wrestling your
frustrations into submission, though you had the power to do so. You
also failed to cash in on much of the great potential you had for
smashing injustice, exposing fakery, and toppling the rotting status
quo. That's the bad news. The good news is that some of your missed
opportunities will become available again in the coming week. Make up
for lost time, please.
I've been spinning so hard (and sometimes falling) in my first weeks of actual reporter training (chronicled in the other blog: link to your left) that I've not dared think about writing here. Writing unrelated to one of my 3 deadlines a week? Time not spent either on my beat (Astoria, Queens) or in class or writing any number of quickly generated pieces that will then be torn to shreds, or beginning to dream my masters' project?
I knew I wanted to come back here after Friday night, after a screening of Good Night and Good Luck, followed by a panel in which George Clooney, the director, shared the stage with his producer, with Victor Navasky, and a CBS correspondent whose name I don't remember. The key question posed by Nick Lemann, who moderated, was "If we had McCarthy now, what would the media do?" After the producer and TV girl chirped that the media would of course step up, Nsvasky weighed in.
He noted a line in the film in which Murrrow says to his boss, "Dissent is not disloyalty." He then said: "In 2001, John Ashcroft named dissent as disloyalty and the media gave him a free ride. Dick Cheney still names dissent as disloyalty, and the media gives him a free ride. George Bush -- " At this point the applause drowned out his completion of the trope.
Clooney, who came next and last, said simply: "What he said. The one with the beard."
A funny line in itself- to use a visual image as he applauds Navasky - coming from an auteur of such good looks that Anthony Lane once called him "human catnip" .
From journalistic heroes like Edward R. Murrow, we now get to move on to someone who soon, I think, will finallyget to cast off the ill-fitting role of journalist.
I mean, of course, Judith Miller, exposed ever so gently today in the pages of her own newspaper.
I won't bother to try to recapitulate all the critiques and deconstructions by far better bloggers, shooting you over to Jane Hamsher, Digby and Greg Mitchell at Editor and Publisher. I actually thought that read carefully, the piece was just as damning as I hoped, and bespeaks a rage that's beginning to boil among people who had to work alongside Miller.
"She has to be fired!" Cynthia Cotts said to me over lunch today. We'd not got together to talk about Judith Miller (I'm privileged to work with her on my master's project), but Cynthia covered the Times extensively during her six years writing the Press Clips column for the Village Voice, and was full of thoughts.
We discussed what was, for both of us, one of the most astonishing tidbits in today's long piece (emphasis mine):
In the year after Mr. Engelberg left the paper in 2002, though, Ms. Miller operated with a degree of autonomy rare at The Times.
Douglas Frantz, who succeeded Mr. Engelberg as the investigative
editor, said that Ms. Miller once called herself "Miss Run Amok."
"I said, 'What does that mean?' " said Mr. Frantz, who was recently
appointed managing editor at The Los Angeles Times. "And she said, 'I
can do whatever I want.' "
......
In two interviews, Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her
interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her
grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.
On July 30, 2003, Mr. Keller became executive editor after his
predecessor, Howell Raines, was dismissed after a fabrication scandal
involving a young reporter named Jayson Blair.
Within a few weeks, in one of his first personnel moves, Mr. Keller
told Ms. Miller that she could no longer cover Iraq and weapons issues.
Even so, Mr. Keller said, "she kept kind of drifting on her own back
into the national security realm."
Although criticism of Ms. Miller's Iraq coverage mounted, Mr. Keller waited until May 26, 2004, to publish an editors' note that criticized some of the paper's coverage of the run-up to the war.
The note said the paper's articles on unconventional weapons were
credulous. It did not name any reporters and said the failures were
institutional. Five of the six articles called into question were
written or co-written by Ms. Miller.