now another reporter, viveca novak, has come forward in the cia/white-house leak case.
what’s most disturbing about all of this isn’t that people in the white house would try to manipulate the press(which is, of course, very disturbing), but rather that the press were so easy to manipulate.
the thought of judith miller, et. al, having such chummy rapports with rove and libby and people in the white house, in fact having such chummy rapports that these members of the press ran items without actually checking up on them(with some relatively small repercussions, like the invasion of iraq…), makes me nauseous.
shouldn’t everyone at the new york times just be fired outright? it seems as if every 6 months there’s yet another incident wherein a times reporter is found to have been writing unsupported front-page pieces that none of their bosses bothered to check up on.
and it’s worth remembering that judith miller(whose name should become synonymous with journalism at it’s worst)served as a mouthpiece for the administrations’ lies in the lead-up to the invasion of iraq.
it was judith miller who wrote that iraq definitely had weapons of mass destruction, solely because rove and co. asked her to do so.
this is not the same as misspelling someone’s name in arts&leisure, or giving a restaurant a good review cos the chef gave you good drugs, this is/was a wholesale breach of the integrity of the journalistic responsibility and integrity of the new york times, a breach that essentially led to the invasion of iraq.
many people in the lead up to the invasion said, ‘well, we don’t trust what the administration is telling us, but the new york times have reported that iraq has weapons of mass destruction, and they wouldn’t report something like that without arduous reporting and due-dilligence, so it must be true.’
but who knew that the ‘arduous reporting’ and ‘due-dilligence’ of the new york times solely involved judith miller hanging out with her good friends scooter libby and karl rove?
it’s gross.
-moby
