From FreeMarketNews...
Disclosures about "Plamegate" Judy Miller's journalistic career continue - along with increased puzzlement over its longevity given her apparent incompetence and disappointment. But as FMNN pointed out yesterday, the recent introduction of the Press Shield bill has changed everything. Importantly, it put into context why Miller may have gone to jail. It allowed her to serve as a "martyr" - and therefore provide a real-life, suffering individual to create a wave of public sympathy that would sweep the Shield bill along.
If the above analysis is correct, then Senator Richard Lugar, Miller, the New York Times and those in the Bush administration and the State Department are orchestrating the passage of legislation that will impose on America for the first time in history the structure for out-and-out press censorship.
Yesterday, FMNN observed the following:
-There still has emerged no real reason why Miller went to jail.
-The mainstream press and powerful federal politicians still search desperately for ways to muzzle the Internet.
-Lugar's bill was mentioned three months in advance of its unveiling - and in a fairly impassioned plea by the publisher of the New York Times who then plainly linked to Judith Miller's situation to it in an eerie foreshadowing of what was to come.
On her increasingly important blogsite, Arianna Huffington has been hard at work cataloguing Judith Miller's lacks. She claimed most recently that when looking back on Miller's career, "it's obvious that there were more 'red flags' popping up around her work as a journalist than at a May Day parade in Red Square." She cites "serious credibility problems" as far back as 2000, when "a Pulitzer Prize-winning colleague of Miller was so disturbed by her journalistic methods," he wrote a memo to his editors, and "asked that his byline not appear on an article they had both worked on." Huffington concludes, "As for those who continue to defend Miller in all of this, I suggest looking for a writer with a background in novels - because trying to present Judy as anything even remotely resembling a journalist will now require someone very adept at crafting fiction."
Huffington's report may only strengthen the a report published yesterday by FMNN (Miller, You Sly Anti-Internet Martyr) because as Huffington points out, Miller was obviously not being kept around not for her reporting skills, but because she was adept at making herself useful to powerful people. She was attracted to stories about "national security" not because they were interesting to her, but quite possibly because it gave her the edge she needed in the competitive world of professional journalism. In her photos, Miller presents the image of an attractive, trim, vivacious individual, and it seems obvious from what is coming out that she was adept at befriending powerful men - Senator Richard Lugar who has publicly professed his affection for her and Vice-President Richard Cheney's chief of staff "Scooter" Libby who recently wrote her a surprisingly intimate letter given the scrutiny the pair are under.
Did Miller intentionally established herself as a kind of government reporter, making it clear that she would use her status at the nation's most powerful and credible newspaper to further necessary government messages under her byline? If this were so, it was a ruse that worked so long as Miller was not undermined by the messages she was called upon to deliver. Her strategy only became increasingly untenable as her "reporting" became increasingly unsupportable. The result was an obvious divergence in which the quality and value of Miller's reporting sank low, while her status at the Times and among her government sources stayed the same or even went up. This was causing great frustration and consternation at the New York Times, even before Miller went to jail. In fact, Miller's decision to go to the "big house" was symptomatic of how this brilliant career woman has become one of the most powerful journalists in the world today. Miller understands well the game between older, powerful men and younger women (which is very possibly what has really got Huffington upset) and how political battles in professional, industrial, venues are won and lost.
Because there has been so much speculation about Miller, some reporters are starting to work out Miller's professional methodology. One recent, brilliant analysis pointed out that the real scandal behind Miller was that she allowed herself to be "licensed" and then embedded like a bacillus in an army unit and transported around Iraq looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction on which to report. Had she found any, even just one, her future would have been assured. The Times would have put her on the front page over and over; she would have won nearly every journalism award in existence and her governmental allies would have ensured million-dollar-plus contracts for upcoming books about her dramatic war time experiences in Iraq. Instead, the lack of WMD's coupled with the Bush administration's arrogance and incompetence undermined the project. Miller didn't win awards - she ended up in the middle of what is becoming the largest scandal since Watergate. Yet still this resourceful women has seemingly continued to out-think her enemies by finding ways to make herself useful. As FMNN speculated yesterday, available evidence seems to point to the real reason Miller allowed herself 86 days in lockup was to provide the utmost aid to those in her professional life who matter - Lugar, Libby, New York Times publisher Arthur Schulzberger, Jr. among many others, no doubt. She is a woman of courage who has earned the respect of her allies, as can be seen by the tone of Libby's letter to her.
CONTINUED: PART TWO