The following is the memo, apparently distributed by Bill Keller and Jill Abrams, to the Times staff regarding today's "Editor's Note" (again, courtesy of my favorite journalism website,
Romanesko):
From: Bill Keller
To: [NYT newsroom]
Subject: To the Staff
Colleagues,
In Wednesday's paper you'll find a note from the editors -- us -- about our coverage of Iraq and its WMD. After a thorough review of that coverage, we feel we owe our readers some explanations. The purpose of the note is to acknowledge that we, like many of our competitors and many officials in Washington, were misled on a number of stories by Iraqi informants dealing in misinformation. This note is not an attempt to find a scapegoat or to blame reporters for not knowing then what we know now. Nor is it intended to signal that you should pull your punches. Quite the contrary. As you have probably noticed in, for example, our coverage of the prisoner abuse story, we prize hard-won, hard-hitting stories.
The note we are publishing will not satisfy our most vociferous critics, but it is not written for them. It is an attempt to set the record straight, something we do as a point of journalistic pride.
For those of you who are wondering about the next chapter of this ordeal, the next chapter is, we keep reporting.
Bill and Jill
Now, to be fair, it's probably even less appropriate to call Miller out among her colleagues -- they all know who's at the root of this. But Keller's blithe implication that Miller's reporting resulted from "not pulling punches" when in fact it resulted from her conflicts of interest and piss-poor journalistic ethics is extremely hard to take. It's one thing to shill before the rest of the world, but must Keller continue the farce in front of his reporters, the people best positioned to call him on it?