By: E&P Staff On Jan. 30, New York Times reporter Judith Miller revealed on Chris Matthews? MSNBC program ?Hardball? that sources had informed her that U.S. officials were, once again, "reaching out" to her old friend, disgraced Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi. Now, she suggested, some were even pushing for him to be given a major post-Iraqi election cabinet post.
Last Sunday, as we've previously noted, Daniel Okrent, the public editor at the Times, took Miller and the newspaper to task in his column, titled "Talking on the Air and Out of Turn."
Okrent wrote: "To anyone who has tried to follow the jagged contours of Ahmad Chalabi's connections to the Bush administration, Miller's statement was a shocker. This piece of news hadn't appeared in The Times that morning; it didn't appear in The Times the next morning. ... But if you watched 'Hardball' and saw Judith Miller identified as a reporter for The New York Times, you would have every reason to think she was speaking with the authority of the paper. ... Judging by their absence from the paper, one must conclude that either Miller's Chalabi revelations were wrong or unsubstantiated or that The Times is suppressing an important piece of news."
Twelve days after Miller appeared on Hardball, and five days after the Okrent column, nothing from Miller on this subject has yet appeared in the Times.
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