Report: Miller, 'NY Times' Close in on Separation Agreement

By: E&P Staff Judith Miller and her employer, The New York Times, are "closing in on a severance agreement," sources tell the New York Observer in this week's edition, out today.

The Observer's Gabriel Sherman also reveals that sources claim that Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., last week "floated a suggestion: What if Ms. Miller cut short her leave of absence and just came back to West 43rd Street sometime after the weekend? It was as if the wistful child of a collapsing marriage were suggesting a family picnic -- a chance for Dad and Mom to remember how their differences weren't always so irreconcilable. Maybe she could be some kind of editor?"

But the publisher's "trial balloon was swiftly shredded," Sherman writes, when Miller demanded to return to her reporting desk. Executive Editor Bill Keller reportedly now stands firmly against this, backed by the paper's "rank-and-file." Keller is part of the severance negotiations, according to Sherman.

Miller also continues to request a space in the paper to rebut her many in-house critics, Sherman writes.

One staffer told Sherman, harkening back to the Jayson Blair mess, that in the Miller case the Howell Raines "is Arthur, not Bill."

But Miller continues to take exception to the paper referring to her, at times, as a rogue reporter. She told Sherman, who visited her near her Sag Harbor, N.Y., home on Saturday, "Every story I did was approved by an editor." At the sit-down with Sherman she was accompanied by her black cockapoo, and Treo.

"Ms. Miller and her lawyers signaled that they were specifically displeased with -- and might consider legal action about -- Mr. Keller's use of the word 'entanglement' in his memo to describe Ms. Miller's connections with now-indicted Vice Presidential aide I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. In the light of long-circulating gossip about Ms. Miller's romantic life, that word choice led to widespread speculation and mockery," Sherman wrote.

Miller told Sherman: "Many people -- many other journalists -- assumed that there was an improper relationship. Many people assumed there was a sexual relationship, which is one reason I'm so insistent on that, on his clarifying [the word choice]. I'll be diplomatic, O.K.? I call it a correction. And at The New York Times, we call it a correction?. But I'll settle for a, quote, 'clarification.'"