Updated 11:05 a.m. Monday
Judy Miller responds to NYT public editor. Posted last night in Byron Calame's Web Journal on the Times site.

Updated 12:44 p.m. Silence not always the most reliable source by blogging former journalist Tom Matrullo was posted last Sunday but is just floating up now as a link in Doc Searls' pointage, Weapons of Times Reconstruction. Tom concludes,

The New York Times' inability to edit Miss Run Amok is part of a recurrent problem within its editorial agon: a certain inability to distinguish reporting on what is there from interpreting what isn't.

In response, I just posted this comment at Tom's:

We work for the readers, most critically as a watchdog on government. Miller seems to have turned that on its head. The Times' failure is not in not editing her (we bloggers edit ourselves, and we don't make it up), it was in not making sure her reporting was accurate after it was contradicted by reports from other serious journalists, including its own Baghdad bureau.

Barbara Crossette, New York Times UN bureau chief, 1994-2001, wrote in a leter to Romenesko: "Ms. Run Amok had at least one very highly placed friend at the paper, and many Times people were afraid to tangle with her because of that."

("You're doin' a heck of a job, Brownie.")

Florida Tom, former editor of Comcast Online in Sarasota, today yesterday segues (Hurricane Liberace link added) from preparing for Wilma into his reactions to Good Night, Good Luck, (aka Murrow v. McCarthy):

Good Night asserts the part about needing to listen to what Power is saying and doing -- mulling it, giving it the full weight of what it is about. And then deciding, Bill Keller and Pinch Sulzberger take note, whether what is being proposed meets the daily minimum requirement of integrity, intelligence, and honor stipulated by the ideals muttered in the Constitution among other places.

(Tom gets the headline award for this toss under a screened portrait of Rolling Stone Keith Richards: "well, some moss.")

Updated 11:36 a.m. Sunday I meant to post this yesterday. While it was leading this section's headline was, Retired N.Y. Times U.N. editor explains reluctance to challenge Miller:

"Journalists who treat access to power as an end in itself are nothing more than propagandists." -- letter to Romenesko

Attytood, the excellent blog at the Philadelphia Daily News, looked at Another case of Miller: The oil-for-food years Monday and points to this letter to Jim Romenesko's media hangout:

Another part of the Miller story

From BARBARA CROSSETTE, New York Times UN bureau chief, 1994-2001: Obscured behind the large issues of weapons of mass destruction and Joseph Wilson's links with the CIA is another story. Over the last year or so, Judith Miller also wrote a series of damaging reports on the "oil for food" scandal at the United Nations -- in particular, personally damaging to Secretary General Kofi Annan because the reports were frequently based on half-truths or hearsay peddled on Capitol Hill by people determined to force Annan out of office. At the UN, this was interpreted as payback for the UN's refusal to back the US war in Iraq. As a former NYT UN bureau chief [now retired] I have been asked repeatedly by diplomats, former US government officials, journalists still reporting from the organization and others why Times editors did not step in to question some of this reporting -- a lot of it proved wrong by the recent report by Paul Volcker -- or why the paper seemed to be on a vendetta against the UN. The Times answered that question Sunday in its page one report on the Miller affair. Ms. Run Amok had at least one very highly placed friend at the paper, and many Times people were afraid to tangle with her because of that. Note also, that Ambassador John Bolton, a severe critic of the UN and a figure so controversial he could not face a confirmation hearing in the Senate, was one of the administration officials who took time to visit Miller in jail.

Updated 2:54 a.m. Sunday The Miller Mess: Lingering Issues Among the Answers. Public editor (ombudsman) Byron Calame ends a restrained piece on Miller that furthers the inside-the-Times story a bit with,

It seems to me that whatever the limits put on her, the problems facing her inside and outside the newsroom will make it difficult for her to return to the paper as a reporter.

You knew that, didn't you?

Updated 1:44 p.m. Updated 12:52 p.m. The blogosphere has "liberated" today's Maureen Dowd column, Woman of Mass Destruction.

3:30 A.M.
The unfolding Judy Miller story is far worse than Jayson Blair -- for the Times, for journalism and for the country.

Editor Says He Missed Miller 'Alarm Bells': AP reports,

The New York Times' Judith Miller belatedly gave prosecutors her notes of a key meeting in the CIA leak probe only after being shown White House records of it, and her boss declared Friday she appeared to have misled the newspaper about her role.

In a dramatic e-mail, Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote Times' employees he wished he'd more carefully interviewed Miller and had "missed what should have been significant alarm bells" that she had been the recipient of leaked information about the CIA officer at the heart of the case.

"Judy seems to have misled (Times Washington bureau chief) Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement," Keller wrote in what he described as a lessons-learned e-mail. "This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper."

Keller said he might have been more willing to compromise with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald "if I had known the details of Judy's entanglement" with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

"If we had lanced the WMD boil earlier, we might have damped any suspicion that THIS time the paper was putting the defense of a reporter above the duty of its readers," he said....

Here's N.Y. Times Editor Bill Keller's email to the staff.

Maureen Dowd's column today -- behind that pay wall that seems a different sort of abdication of the Times' duty to its readers -- about Judy Miller is headlned Woman of Mass Destruction. Here's the fair-use quote that some with access are putting out as the takeaway:

Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country." If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

Also at Poynter, an excerpt from Kurt Andersen's New York Magazine piece, "IMPERIAL CITY: St. Judy’s Got To Go," which goes online Monday:

The symmetry of Plamegate’s simultaneous damage to both lobes of the Establishment has a novelistic irony -- the neoconservative Bush administration and the flagship of old-line liberalism are suffering disproportionately from the same, fundamentally trivial piece of Washington business-as-usual. What’s more, Arthur Sulzberger is sort of the George W. Bush of media. Both are the preppy baby-boom sons of distinguished, understated preppy fathers, Punch and Poppy, from whom they inherited their given names and positions of power. Both are big outdoor-exercise buffs, both are insecure but cocky, both have a bratty streak, both are prone to inappropriate jocularity. And each presides from within an insular management bubble....

If there ever was a meritocracy, I wish it would make a comeback. Many in this generation's well-born old-boy network these days -- the guys running the country and its major institutions -- seem to lack common sense. Too many "alarm bells" have gone unheeded.