Judith Miller's Matyred Self-Promotion

Greg Palast has it basically correct that Judith Miller of the NY Times is protecting her access to the Bush administration, not the First Amendment and certainly not an individual source.

My view is that Miller's status as a reporter is so slimed by her whoring for the Bush II administration up through and even after the Iraq War II that she decided the only way to salvage her reputation was to don the mantle of martyrdom. It's not like she is in a dangerous jail that the poor and minority sort of accused are placed in.

Not standing up for Miller in this instance will not abridge the reporter's otherwise already limited right to prote sources. Instead, the growing silence except among the haughty Mikey Isikoff and his friends says what needs to be said about someone as odious as Judith Miller. By the way, here is a catty, but still valid article on the rise and beginning of the fall of Judith Miller, who represents everything that has ever been wrong with a certain breed of arrogant NY Times reporter since the days of Walter Duranty.

For those who don't know Walter Duranty, he is the poster boy among historians for journalistic malpractice and misfeasance. Duranty thought he didn't need to go beyond his usual sources and slavishly devoted himself to the elite whom he covered in Russia--and with whom he feared the loss of access if he covered anything they didn't want to hear. There is a similar story with Judith Miller's close source, Chalabi, and her neo-con elitists in Washington DC (and now with the Busheviks) with whom she continues to pal around. Duranty's failure or refusal to report on Stalin's terrors are clearly on a different level than Miller's failures and refusals to print the truths we now know about Iraq and the Middle East. However, Miller's arrogance with fellow reporters, her naivete about important events, and fear of losing access to power are of a piece with Duranty. One could definitely see a self-promoter such as Duranty doing the stunt of protecting a political boss (i.e. Rove) so as to make "martyr points" to salvage his reputation.