The Judy Miller Is Free Post
Whether you think the Times writing about itself is more like "O.J. promising to hunt down the real killers" or "like reading Pravda about the Kremlin 20 years ago", there's something for everyone in Kit Seelye's Party Crash: Judy Is Elected Homecoming Queen by the New York Times. Watch the video, the outtakes from which are sure to be an office Christmas party favorite!
Ms. Miller returned to her desk in the newsroom for the first time since she was jailed on July 6. Bouquets of flowers surrounded her computer, which a technology assistant said was clogged with 100,000 e-mail messages. She looked thin, and said she had lost more than 20 pounds in jail, which she called a "soulless" place. She tugged at the waist of her pants, showing that they were at least four inches too big.
Ain't this just the cutest goddam thing ever? Of those 100,000 emails, we're guessing a quarter were waivers of confidentiality that still read just a tad too "coerced," half were hectoring school-yard taunts of increasing vulgarity from Arianna Huffington, and the rest were offerings of First Amendment awards from groups of concerned journalists and civil libertarians followed 10-20 minutes later by emails from said groups saying only "psyche!"
Mostly unfunny thoughts on America's Official First Amendment Mascot after the jump.
While we are dues-paying members of the Judy-bashing society, it seems like she's not quite dissembling when she says she didn't cave in or abandon her principles — her "principles," such as they are, seem to involve mainly saving her own ass and the asses of her sources, with whom she is fairly friendly [PDF]. The waiver thing's a red herring. Here's the money graf:
Ms. Miller also turned over her notes to Mr. Fitzgerald, but she said she was allowed to redact them herself, removing irrelevant information, rather than having to submit them to a third party to redact.
The "administration officials" Miller relied on for her stories all presumably gave her the same waivers that Karl Rove gave to Matt Cooper and that Libby seems to think he gave Miller a year ago — but it wasn't until Miller wasn't obligated to talk about anything except edited portions of one chat with Scooter that the miraculous "uncoerced" waiver appeared. Judy's goal, achieved when Fitzgerald allowed her to "narrow the scope" of her testimony, is to make sure that this case doesn't turn into a full-scale re-investigation into who, exactly, was responsible for the pre-Iraq War intelligence failures, and whether those failures involved an intentional abuse of the Free Press.
All that aside, though, we just love any story that causes ol' non-blogger Jim Romenesko to get all sarcastic.
