Major Magazine Article Critical of Judith Miller of 'NY Times'

By: E&P Staff In a lengthy profile published today in New York magazine, writer Franklin Foer paints an extremely unflattering portrait of star New York Times reporter Judith Miller, less than a week after an editors' note in her newspaper criticized some of her Iraq-related reporting (while not naming her). He also identifies former Executive Editor Howell Raines as the key enabler for some of her shoddiest work.

Foer refers to Miller's "seemingly bottomless ambition," and her "pair of big feet that would stomp on colleagues in her way and even crunch a few bystanders," but many of the most critical comments come from Miller's colleagues at the paper. Some reporters at the Times claim they have told their editors they will never share a byline with her. "She considers us to be her minions," says one.

However, very few of these critics allow their names to be used in the article.

Executive Editor Bill Keller admitted to Foer that Miller "has sharp elbows," is "possessive of her sources" and "a little obsessive" but added that many people would say the same of legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.

This completes a week during which the Times, after much prodding from critics, published its editors' note, which criticized half a dozen of its weapons of mass destruction articles (most of them authored or co-authored by Miller). A column by Public Editor Daniel Okrent also hit the paper's WMD coverage.

Foer's article, which had been in the works for weeks and is based on dozens of on- and off-the-record interviews, contains plenty of "dish" on Miller, some from former colleagues speaking on the record. Jeffrey Goldberg refers to her "unpleasant hyper-aggressiveness." Adam Clymer recalls her days as deputy editor of the Washington bureau when she would call reporters and editors in the middle of the night to complain about stories. But most of the withering criticism comes from unnamed sources.

But how did her faulty, and extremely influential WMD reporting (partly based on tips from Ahmad Chalabi and other dubious sources), get into the paper in the first place?

Of course, Miller was a star reporter and a role model in Howell Raines' drive to raise what he called "the competitive metabolism" of the paper. Then, in the summer of 2002, Raines was widely criticized for running a prominent story by Patrick Tyler that wrongly attributed antiwar views to Henry Kissinger. In the aftermath, according to an (unnamed) ex-Times editor, Raines wanted to prove that he could be "fair-minded about the Bush administration" and so "bent over backwards to back them often." Another former editor said that in the following months, during the run up to the war, Raines often objected to stories that questioned the administration's claims on Iraq while "never" raising doubts about Miller's pieces. Again, this is an unnamed source.

According to Foer, investigations editor Doug Frantz and foreign editor Roger Cohen "went to managing editor Gerald Boyd on several occasions with concerns about Miller's over reliance on Chalabi and his Pentagon champions. ... But Raines and Boyd continually reaffirmed managements' faith in her by putting her stories on page 1."

Complicating matters was that some believed that Steven Engelberg was the only editor who could "harness" her -- and he had left the paper.

Raines last week declared that he had never rushed a Miller story into print before it was ready. And Keller told Foer: "It's a little galling to watch her pursued by some of these armchair media ethicists who have never ventured into a war zone or earned the right to carry Judy's laptop."