Miller Calls Keller's Criticism 'Seriously Inaccurate'

By: Jay DeFoore The spat between embattled New York Times reporter Judith Miller and the paper's editor has heated up in the last 24 hours, and many of the details are playing out in the press.

On Friday, Executive Editor Bill Keller sent a memo to New York Times staffers expressing regrets at the way he handled Miller and her involvement in the CIA leak investigation since taking over in 2003.

Keller wrote that Miller "seems to have misled" Phil Taubman, the paper's Washington bureau chief, in 2003 when he sought to determine which of his reporters may have been the recipient of a government leak of the identity of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA officer and wife of Joseph Wilson, a leading critic of the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq.

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In an article in Saturday's Times, Miller shot back, calling Keller's charges "seriously inaccurate."

"I certainly never meant to mislead Phil, nor did I mislead him," Miller was quoted as saying in an article by Katharine Q. Seelye.

Seelye wrote that Miller shared with her "a copy of a memorandum she had sent to Mr. Keller in response," which the paper's public editor, Byron Calame, has now posted in full.

Calame, for his part, finally weighed in on the controversy swirling around the newsroom.

Calame quoted Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., as saying there will need to be "new limits on what [Miller] can do next" if she returns to the paper. Calame is more skeptical of Miller's ability to return unscathed. "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," Calame concluded.

Outside the Times, Keller's memo seems to have sparked a chain of editorials around the country blasting Miller.

In an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times titled "How Judith Miller Was Used," Tim Rutten writes that "the Washington press corps continues to be studded with useful idiots like Miller, who would whack their own grandmothers for a byline above the fold."

Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz devoted his Saturday column to the feud, running with the headline "A Split Between The Times & Miller?"

In an Op-Ed in the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, St. Paul, actor and playwright Mark Rosenwinkel compared Miller's journalistic sins to those of Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair. "Even though Miller was not deliberately fabricating stories in the manner of Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and others, they were all engaged in something even more basic and self-serving: high level career maintenance at the expense of public truth," Rosenwinkel writes. "The tragedy is that it's not only their personal integrity that's at stake, but our national honor."

Miller was even savaged in her own paper Saturday by Maureen Dowd, who titled her latest column "Woman of Mass Destruction."

"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,'" Dowd wrote. "If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands."

In other developments, Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the leak, set up a Web site Friday, a move that may signal that indictments are imminent.