Judith Miller Denies Being 'Played for a Chump'

By: E&P Staff When former New York Times reporter Judith Miller appeared with Bob Garfield on public radio's popular "On the Media" program this past weekend, sparks flew. This was no Larry King lovefest.

For example, Garfield asked about Miller's infamous agreement to identify Scooter Libby as a "former Hill staffer" rather than administration official: "So one promise you make to your source is so important that you'll go to jail to honor it but another is just a trick to get information?"

Miller replied: "No, it's not a trick. It's called reporting.

A partial transcript follows.

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GARFIELD: By your own retelling, in the New York Times, you said that you agreed in the conversations with Scooter Libby that you would identify him not as a "high White House official" but in fact as a "former [Capitol] Hill staffer," a technical truth. Now, it never showed up in the newspaper but you made an agreement with him to identify him that way.

MILLER: No, I did not.

GARFIELD: Am I correct?

MILLER: No, you are wrong. I never agreed to identify Scooter Libby in print by that attribution. I only - I agreed to listen to what he had to say under that attribution. If I had ever used that information, I would have gone back to him, as I have done with other sources, and said, "You know, this attribution simply won't fly. Let's talk about an attribution which reflects who you really are but doesn't identify you."

GARFIELD: You said to him, "Yes, I will listen to your story as a former Capitol Hill staffer," and then you let him tell you what he had to tell you. Correct?

MILLER: Absolutely.

GARFIELD: And then had you decided to print, then you would go back and try to get him to change the terms of the - [OVERTALK]

MILLER: Not try to get him. He would either change the attribution or I wouldn't use the information, or I would go to somebody else for the information and get it confirmed, hopefully on the record, which is what happens all the time in Washington national security reporting.

GARFIELD: Well, then forgive, please, the "do you still beat your wife" question, but if you had no intention of using that attribution that you negotiated, then why have the negotiation to begin with? I mean - [OVERTALK]

MILLER: 'Cause I was interested in listening to what the man had to say.

GARFIELD: So one promise you make to your source is so important that you'll go to jail to honor it but another is just a trick to get information.

MILLER: No, it's not a trick. It's called reporting. [OVERTALK]

GARFIELD: Doesn't that take the air out of your claim to be acting on principle?

MILLER: Excuse me. You want to argue with me, fine. But that's the way that I conducted this interview and the way things unfolded. There was no story, so we'll never know whether you're right or I'm right, but there is one difference. Mr. Libby has never been identified in any way, shape, or form as anything other than an administration official in one of my stories. And moreover, in 28 years of journalism I have never, ever been accused by my paper of misattributing a source, not once.

GARFIELD: Let's move away from the particulars of the Plame affair for a moment and sort of the other general allegations that have been made against you by outsiders and insiders at the Times. You've acknowledged that your WMD reporting in several material instances got it wrong, but you've also said that the story is only as good as its sources. Now - [OVERTALK]

MILLER: Right.

GARFIELD: - to put the question in plain language, Judy, were you played for a chump by these sources, Ahmed Chalabi in particular?

MILLER: You know, first of all [LAUGHS] I - I'm not going to be insulted by your question, but I think that the sources that I relied on were reliable. They had been reliable in the past. I'm not going to discuss who they were, though many of them were actually identified by name in my stories. Moreover, those stories were heavily edited. They just didn't dance their way into the New York Times. As the editor's note acknowledged, everybody's wrong if your sources are wrong.

GARFIELD: There is this kind of archetype in journalism of the State Department reporter who takes to smoking pipes and wearing tweed and the police reporter who puts lights in his car, and other reporters who become so associated with the beat that they're on that they cease to be distinguishable from the people they're actually covering. Were you so immersed in spooks that you sort of started seeing yourself as a spook yourself?

MILLER: Oh, hardly. You know, I'm a journalist. Those lines don't get blurred. But yeah, I do hang out with sources. If I was hanging out with fellow journalists, I usually wasn't learning anything. If I was hanging out with, you know, national security policy wonks, I tended to learn something.

GARFIELD: Is there nothing to the charge that you are so successful in getting to the corridors of power that you're at times unable to distinguish what is good information from manipulation?

MILLER: You know, look at my record and look at the record of stories, and you'll see that about 90 percent of them are not only accurate but were front-page stories that have been widely praised. And I think that, you know, the record will answer that question.

GARFIELD: But your record also includes a half dozen or so stories about weapons of mass destruction which - [OVERTALK]

MILLER: A half dozen. How many stories do you think I've written over my 28-year career at the New York Times? We're talking about half a dozen stories out of a career of literally - [OVERTALK]

GARFIELD: A half a dozen stories that - [BOTH AT ONCE]

MILLER: - hundreds and hundreds of stories - [OVERLAPPING VOICES]

GARFIELD: - at the moment in a buildup -

MILLER: - many of which have won prizes. And, yeah, at times every reporter is going to get things wrong. I've already said I got WMD wrong. [LAUGHS] I've never said I'm a perfect reporter.

GARFIELD: But under the circumstances, considering how critical the New York Times reporting on this subject was to the Administration's case for war, have you looked inwardly, amid all of this controversy, and said not only did I make mistakes, but I made egregious mistakes and this is really hard to live with? Just how comfortable are you with - [OVERTALK]

MILLER: No. I have not - I have - [BOTH AT ONCE]...Excuse me. Every time I make a mistake in a story, I go back and I look and I say to myself, "how did I get this wrong." I honestly believe that if you look at my stories, and very few people have even bothered to read them, you will see that the information that I was given was always vetted by outside independent experts -- did this make sense, was it possible, was it probable? I - I wish that people were more concerned about how the U.S. intelligence community, all of the agencies, got it so wrong.