Miller Time Out

"On Sept. 29, a remarkable story appeared on the front page of The New York Times," William E. Jackson, Jr. writes in Editor & Publisher. Far down in the story there is a mea culpa for reporting by the Times' Judith Miller on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. Miller's stories relied heavily on information and defectors provided by the Iraqi National Congress's Ahmad Chalabi. "Miller is not a neutral, nor an objective journalist," Jackson writes. "This can be acceptable, if you're a great reporter, "but she ain't, and that's why she's a propagandist,'" a former Times employee told Jackson. "One major rule that she consistently violates, when she is not sharing a byline, is that of 'protecting the paper's neutrality.' The editors know, of course, that she is an ideological neo-conservative, close to the Bush administration neo-cons, and thoroughly identified with them. She had called for the overthrow of Saddam's regime in non-Times publications and had also spoken out before the war in public speeches for which she was paid," Jackson writes.