The Laughing Wolf

Judith Miller And The Media Witch Hunt

For all the cries of dishonest reporting at the New York Times, perhaps the most shocking and powerful cries are being aimed at reporter and author Judith Miller. The surprising thing is that these attacks are coming from other reporters, reporters who feel that she was a stooge of the Bush administration.

Judith Miller is a respected writer who has plenty of chops when it comes to Weapons of Mass Destruction and related issues. She has written extensively on the subject, and was one of the few -- if not the only -- reporter saying that Iraq had and was trying to expand. She has even travelled with one of the exploitation teams that raced into Iraq to check out sites, and was the reporter who broke the story that Iraq had destroyed many of its weapons just days before the war.

She is reported to be angry at the fire directed her way by fellow journalists, but she really should not be surprised. Even stories such as this one, which paints her in a sympathetic light even as it damns her with faint praise, toes the party line of The Media. There were no weapons, Bush lied, and it's a quagmire. This one adds to a growing meme in journalistic circles, that Miller lied, or was duped into helping Bush sell the war through planted misinformation.

I strongly doubt that someone of her reputation would be easily mislead, much less would lie for a political cause. In fact, despite the fact that she does work for that miserable rag, I tend to find her one of the more believable, thorough, and professional reporters out there. She has taken the time to learn her subject matter, to develop a world-wide network of sources, pretty much force her way onto an exploitation team, and otherwise do what it takes to get the story.

Therein, I suspect, lies the problem. She knows the subject matter, therefore she has violated the dicta within The Media that all who know or understand the military are the enemy; she is willing to put her life and reputation on the line in a way that few in journalism are willing to do and so she shows up a heck of a lot of what passes for media these days; and, she calls them as she sees them, rather than how a particular belief system tells her she should see it. All this makes her a pariah to many of her peers, so it is not surprising that this opportunity is being taken to slam her.

Go read her works where you can find them and judge for yourself. As for me, it is going to take a lot more than the big lie crowd to change my mind on her. If they can ever give fact instead of rumor and big lie, have the courage to make specific charges instead of general drek usually thrown at politicians, and show citations on where she was wrong, then I may listen. Until then, I will continue to read and believe her, because she has earned that respect with her track record. The hyenas snapping at her heels are less than dust, and about as deserving of respect.

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