JUDITH MILLER FINALLY FACES THE MUSIC? NY TIMES: oops

Judy's Turn To Cry - The New York Times prepares an "Editors' Note" about its prewar WMD reporting. By Jack Shafer

Miller's work on WMD in the Times deserves special scrutiny because so many of her sensational stories never panned out—from a December 2001 piece about now-discredited Iraqi defector Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, who claimed inside knowledge about a score of Iraq WMD programs and storage facilities, to a December 2002 scoop about a possible Russia-Iraq smallpox collaboration, to a January 2003 eve-of-war piece reiterating the defectors' stories of Iraqi WMD. Miller's credulous reporting turned absolutely hyperbolic when she joined the search for WMD on the ground in Iraq, embedding with the U.S. military's Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha. In an April 21, 2003, piece, Miller claimed that an Iraqi scientist had led the military to a cache of precursor compounds for a banned "toxic agent." She told The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer the next day that the scientist was more than a "smoking gun" in the WMD search, he was the "silver bullet." But by July 2003, still no WMD had been found in Iraq. Instead of blaming the defectors and inside sources who had led her astray, Miller put the onus on the poor logistics of the weapons search! (See this "The Scoops That Melted," a "Press Box" from last year for more details.)

And from Daily KOS:

NY Times says oops.

But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge.
They wish they had been more aggressive. So probably did 913 allied troops and thousand of Iraqis killed in the war. Not to mention the thousands more wounded in the war.

I spoke at a media conference a few months ago, where scandalized Big Media execs and journalism professors expressed outrage that people would read the blogs. "How --" they asked, "Can readers trust what they read in the blogs?" Didn't the public know they needed media execs to filter out the news from the chaffe?

I launched into one of my tirades --

"How can you claim to be the rightful gatekeepers of news when you have failed the American public so fully? You feed them Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Martha Stewart, and every single WMD lie the administration has fed you, with nary an attempt to learn the truth. And we are supposed to trust you? You've had your chance. You failed."

Idiots. The editors, Judith Miller, and every other journalist who helped enable the administration's lies have blood on their hands.

I'm sure the chickenhawk warblogging cabal (or, as TBogg calls them, the 101st Fighting Keyboarders) will be more than happy to share some of that blood on their hands. And if there's ever a shortage, there's barrels of it in the offices of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and Powell, etc.

Digby, of Hullaballoo, as usual, says it better than I.

UPDATE: The Washington Post takes a more nearly honest look at the Miller/NYTimes WMD coverage than the newspaper-of-record.