The Post-Blair Witch Hunt Project

The age of the blogosphere has produced a new genre of mainstream journalism: fake transparency. The New York Times has become its foremost practitioner. The paper of record has been arraigned for arrogance so many times in the last three years that it has forgotten how useful arrogance can be. The Gulliver of West 43rd Street has gotten so spooked that now it preemptively lies down, affixes bonds to its wrists and ankles, and invites the Lilliputians of cyberspace to walk all over it.After reading the 6,000-word takeout in Sunday’s Times on the Judith Miller/I. Lewis Libby farrago in the Valerie Plame/CIA leak case, accompanied by Ms. Miller’s own strangely cryptic narrative of her belated grand jury testimony, I know even less than I thought I knew before. Thinking I knew was actually more satisfying. It meant I could exude a vague insiderly outrage without having to penetrate the clues. For Arianna Huffington, the Miller story has been to her newly birthed blog, the Huffington Post, a miniature version of what O.J. Simpson was to cable news.All the angst goes back to Jayson Blair. The fabrication debacle two years ago prompted the Times to sign on to the new censorious self-examining culture, in which journalistic institutions strive to be as transparent as religious and governmental ones (yeah, right). But not all stories are as Manichean as the Blair debacle. The Miller epic is so complex and compromised it probably can’t be told truthfully until after the special prosecutor has unloosed his thunderbolts – and maybe not even then.Readers would rather have waited and gotten a story they could at least understand. Newsrooms, however, can’t handle that kind of old-fashioned restraint. The blogs are baying to be fed, the competition is kicking their butt on the story, stock prices are down. “Transparency” turns into a combination of partial truths and morose institutional venting that makes everyone, including the readers, feel worse about themselves and the newspaper than they did before.All I could extract from Sunday’s Miller marathon was her own implausible revelation that after having 85 days in jail to think about it, she has no memory of where she got that memorable Marvel Comics name – Valerie Flame – that was mysteriously inscribed in her recently surfaced notebook. Ms. Miller also mentions running into I. Lewis Libby, in a cowboy hat and sunglasses, at a rodeo in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and failing to recognize him. “Judy,” he said. “It’s Scooter Libby!” But was it? Maybe it was Don Imus. Or Muammar Gadhafi.Don Van Natta’s team-reported narrative included such baffling details as the Times’s executive editor, Bill Keller, blandly noting that, after he took her off the Iraq story on account of her lead role in co-authoring the erroneous stories of Iraq’s WMD, Ms. Miller “kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm.” Drifting? On her own? Is the Times after Mr. Blair some sort of trackless sea, with lone castaways afloat on rafts? Whom do reporters report to? IS THERE ANYBODY HOME?Such is the power of Dame Judith’s mystique with the Times’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., that his paper quotes him as saying it was Ms. Miller’s “hand on the wheel” throughout the course of the legal decision-making, even though his editors seem to regard her as a less malleable version of Madame Chiang Kai-shek.The Times left out the best bit of Doug Frantz’s contribution to Mr. Van Natta’s account of the day when Mr. Frantz (then the Times’s investigative editor and now managing editor of the Los Angeles Times) and foreign editor Roger Cohen objected to a story involving allegations that there were 1,000 or more WMD sites identified in Iraq. Ms. Miller complained to Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, and, according to a quote that didn’t make it in, “A couple of hours later Gerald pulled Roger and me into his office and chewed us out. ‘Judy Miller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and your job is to get her stories into the paper!’ said Gerald.”Maybe this isn’t so much transparent journalism as reality TV crossed with teenage soap opera, starring Ms. Miller as the alpha Heather. “It’s official. I’m Miss Run Amok,” she announces after a tsk-tsk session with Mr. Boyd. And Mr. Boyd’s successor as co-managing editor, Jill Abramson, asked if she regrets any part of the Times’s handling of the matter, replies sulkily, “The entire thing.” You can almost hear the door to her room slamming. The script is like a rejected pilot for the WB network.It’s the curse of mainstream press and broadcast institutions these days that every time they make a stand on principle, they pick a story as murky as the times we live in. There was CBS’s Rathergate, in which the steamrolling producer Mary Mapes played a Miller-like role. And the BBC had the Dodgy Dossier saga, in which the excitable Andrew Gilligan overstated a report about how Downing Street hyped the imminence of the threat from Saddam’s WMD. Both of these stories – right in essence, wrong in the particular – wound up being driven over a cliff by journalists who got too embedded with their sources. In Ms. Miller’s case, it was even more theater of the absurd. She had the name wrong and the story right but at least this time they didn’t print it.You have to feel sorry for Mr. Sulzberger. Like every spirited young man who inherits a newspaper, he hankers after something more exciting than sitting in the front office fretting over the price of newsprint. He wants to feel as real in his role as valiant publisher as his reporters – those driven, passionate, sometimes reckless seekers after truth – feel in theirs. When he threw his support behind Judy Miller’s fight to protect her sources, he didn’t think he was in a bad reality show. He thought it was an Oscar-winning movie – “The Pentagon Papers 2.”We’d have liked that, too. But we don’t have to look back that far for inspiration when there are so many great reporters at the Times and elsewhere putting themselves on the line every day for stories that do run rather than stories that don’t. That’s the ultimate bathos of the Judy Miller saga – appropriate, perhaps, for our virtual, “transparent” age.

The Post-Blair Witch Hunt Project

The Post-Blair Witch Hunt Project

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