Jake Highton

Investigative reporting is not stenography.
--Maureen Dowd, New York Times columnist

For any good political reporter, the government is the adversary. Politicians and government officials are working for themselves, seeking always to look good. Reporters are working for their readers.

Yes, reporters need sources. They must cultivate politicians and government officials. But the danger is buddy-buddyism, getting too close to sources and being co-opted and manipulated.

And this is precisely where Judy Miller of the New York Times and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post went awry. They gave their allegiance to government officials and not to readers.

The Times wrote a lengthy mea culpa a few years ago over reporter Jayson Blair because he mingled fiction with fact. Unprofessional and unethical to be sure. But his faults are trivial compared with the enormous consequences of Miller’s reporting.

What she did, in effect, was regurgitate “press releases,” backing White House lies to advocate Bush’s war. She ignored the I.F. Stone dictum: “Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed. That’s a prima facie assumption unless proven to the contrary.”

The Times is the most influential newspaper in the country. Miller’s reporting lent credence to an immoral war in Iraq, 2,105 GI deaths, 30,000 Iraqi deaths, a cost of $300 billion and counting, and untold destruction and disarray.

Though considered by some a martyr for going to jail rather than reveal a source, Miller has become a disgrace to journalism. Indeed, columnist Arianna Huffington calls Miller’s false and feverish stories about WMD in Iraq the blackest mark on the 154-year-old Times. Perhaps Miller takes cues from Bob Woodward, who has long since lost the glory of Watergate days. For years he has been a flack for White House propagandists, including President Bush.

William Greider’s article, “All the King’s Media,” in The Nation recently got to the heart of of the matter:

“Heroic truth-tellers in the Watergate saga, the established media are now in disrepute, scandalized by unreliable ‘news’ and over-intimate attachment to powerful (Bush) court insiders. The major media stand too close to the (Bush) throne, deferred too eagerly to the king’s (Bush’s) twisted version of reality and his lust for war.”

What rightly shocked Greider was the intimacy Miller developed with her source, Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff. She was in bed metaphorically with Libby and--the gossip is--literally. While in jail for 85 days, Miller got a billet-doux from Libby with lines like these: “Come back to work--and life…Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning.”

Christopher Dickey put it perfectly in a Newsweek essay: Reporters long ago concluded that “having access to power is more important than speaking truth to it.”

Former ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote an article in July 2003 debunking one Bush excuse for the war. In retaliation, the White House outed Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent.

Petty, yes, but also against the law. Libby was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. But above all, Miller, as columnist Robert Scheer wrote, was an accomplice “to a top White House official’s attempt to discredit a whistle-blower.”

Harry Reid, Senate Democratic leader, made the unassailable point that the case is bigger than the leak. “It’s about how the Bush administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for war.”

Wilson speaks harshly about the war: “It has left our international reputation in tatters and our military broken. It has weakened the United States, increased hatred of us and made terrorist attacks against our interests more likely in the future. It has been, as Gen. William Odom suggested, the greatest strategic blunder in the history of our country.”

The ever-changing reasons the Bush administration utters for the war have been cited often. But it is hard to top the vivid fantasy of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: mushroom clouds!

Goering’s speech at the Nuremburg trial has been much quoted but it is worth repeating: “The people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders … All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.”

Which is precisely what Bush and Vice President Cheney have been doing since 9/11-- playing on fear and challenging the patriotism of war critics.

Frank Rich, marvelous essayist for The New York Times, recently summed up the situation perfectly: “The war is lost both as a political matter at home and a practical matter in Iraq.”

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