SHILLING FOR DOLLARS

Judy Miller, Armstrong Williams -- What's the diff?

Miller did things a journalist should never do. She shilled for a White House disinformation campaign that was promoting an invasion of Iraq, accepted control from the Pentagon, and deceptively misidentified her sources. Yet she hasn’t been fired by her official employer, the NY Times. Was Times senior management in on the game?
As the Plamegate scandal grows, it now appears that Judy Miller’s role was something akin to that of Armstrong Williams, the “journalist” who was hired by the White House and Department of Education to write articles selling the administration’s No Child Left Behind school “reform” scam.

Miller’s job, it appears, was to use her journalistic role to peddle a war in Iraq. Miller may not have gotten dirty dollars the way Williams did, but she didn’t need that. She was paid differently. With a book out on Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, the more she was out there pushing the WMD scare story, the more books she sold. Then too, there was the notoriety she gained by being known as the N.Y. Times expert on WMD. At the heart of the story, Miller was a sought-after guest on news networks like CNN and Fox.

Of course, there is one big difference between Williams and Miller. William's shilling for the White House just helped to damage the education of millions of kids. Miller's shilling helped lead to the slaughter of 100,000 Iraqis, many of them children, and to the needless deaths of some 2000 American soldiers.

Tags: Judith Miller, Armstrong Williams, WMD