Keller Calls Kinsley 'Perversely Remote' on Plame Case

By: E&P Staff New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has hit back hard at a request from Nick Goldberg, the Los Angeles Times' Op-Ed editor, to set up a published debate between his jailed reporter Judith Miller and the L.A. Times' editorial editor Michael Kinsley. Among other things, Keller called Kinsley "perversely remote" from the current controversy.

He also reminded Goldberg, "Sadly, Judy is not on a fellowship at some writers' colony. She is in JAIL. She is sleeping on a foam mattress on the floor, and her communications are, shall we say, constrained."

Kinsley has written two columns opposing Miller's right to protect her source in this case, arguing that in certain cases the government's right to know overrides journalistic principles. His most recent piece appeared Sunday. This prompted Goldberg to ask Keller to suggest to Miller that she respond, from the detention center in Virginia where she has resided since last Wednesday.

The exchange of e-mails between Goldberg and Keller was published today at the Romenesko site at www.poynter.org.

Keller responded with this:

"How clever of the Los Angeles Times to propose that Judy Miller debate Mike Kinsley on the subject of press freedom. I have to tell you that Mike's contrarian intellectualizing on the subject of reporters and the law was more amusing when it was all hypothetical. Back then it was just punditry. But that was before Norm Pearlstine embraced acquiescence as corporate policy, and before Judy Miller braved the real-world discomforts of the moral high ground. Of course this is an important issue, and clever minds should wrestle with it. But at the moment Kinsley and Pearlstine seem perversely remote from the world where actual reporters work."

Kinsley had written on Sunday: "The coverup [in the Plame case] is crumbling. Wrongdoers may be exposed and punished. All no thanks to the New York Times. If the world worked as the New York Times thinks it should, the coverup would be rock-solid?. For all the grand talk about the 1st Amendment, this isn't about the right of the press to publish information. It is about a right to keep information secret?.

?The biggest problem standing in the way of a compromise is that journalists who share the philosophy of the New York Times assert the right to decide unilaterally. Even if they acknowledge the possibility that their needs don't always trump everybody else's, they insist that their judgment -- any individual journalist's judgment in any particular case -- does trump everybody else's."