A Message from Bill Keller:
Colleagues,
As you can imagine, I've done a lot of thinking -- and a lot of listening -- on the subject of what I should have done differently in handling our reporter's entanglement in the White House leak investigation. Jill and John and I have talked a great deal among ourselves and with many of you, and while this is a discussion that will continue, we thought it would be worth taking a first cut at the lessons we have learned.
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[W]e've come up with a few points at which we wish we had made different decisions. These are instances, when viewed with the clarity of hindsight, where the mistakes carry lessons beyond the peculiar circumstances of this case.
I wish we had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD as soon as I became executive editor. At the time, we thought we had compelling reasons for kicking the issue down the road ... I was trying to get my arms around a huge new job, appoint my team, get the paper fully back to normal, and I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction.
The irony is, aggressively and accuratly covering the WMD story would have
helped the NYT as they struggled to save face after the Jason Blair fiasco.
UPDATE: I have read and re-read this part and just do not understand. How could any editor refer to effectivly investigating the reasons for going to war a "crippling distraction." Keller goes further to explain that what he was afraid of being destracted from was rounding up a new team?!?!
What is a newspaper supposed to do? I thought it was supposed to provide information regarding important public issues and events. What can possibly be more important than alleged nuclear weapons and mushroom clouds.
Furthermore, what stories were deemed "not a crippling distraction?" What stories could the paper handle, while at the same time jugling the difficult job of rounding up a new team??
So it was a year before we got around to really dealing with the controversy. At that point, we published a long editors' note acknowledging the prewar journalistic lapses, and -- to my mind, at least as important - - we intensified aggressive reporting aimed at exposing the way bad or manipulated intelligence had fed the drive to war. ... The fact is sometimes overlooked that a lot of the best reporting on how this intel fiasco came about appeared in the NYT.
By waiting a year to own up to our mistakes, we allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, we fear, we fostered an impression that The Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers. If we had lanced the WMD boil earlier, we might have damped any suspicion that THIS time, the paper was putting the defense of a reporter above the duty to its readers.
I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own. It is a natural and proper instinct to defend reporters when the government seeks to interfere in our work ...But in this case I missed what should have been significant alarm bells. Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper.
In the end, I'm pretty sure I would have concluded that we had to fight this case in court. For one thing, we were facing an insidious new menace in these blanket waivers, ostensibly voluntary, that Administration officials had been compelled to sign.But if I had known the details of Judy's entanglement with Libby, I'd have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense, and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises.
Dick Stevenson has expressed the larger lesson here in an e-mail that strikes me as just right: "I think there is, or should be, a contract between the paper and its reporters. The contract holds that the paper will go to the mat to back them up institutionally -- but only to the degree that the reporter has lived up to his or her end of the bargain, specifically to have conducted him or herself in a way consistent with our legal, ethical and journalistic standards, to have been open and candid with the paper about sources, mistakes, conflicts and the like, and generally to deserve having the reputations of all of us put behind him or her. In that way, everybody knows going into a battle exactly what the situation is, what we're fighting for, the degree to which the facts might counsel compromise or not, and the degree to which our collective credibility should be put on the line."
I've heard similar sentiments from a number of reporters in the aftermath of this case.
Is he suggesting Judy Miller
did not act in a way consistant w/ the NYT's legal, ethical, and journalistic standards?
There is another important issue surfaced by this case: how we deal with the inherent conflict of writing about ourselves. This paper...has had way too much experience of that over the past few years ... Yet it is excruciating to withhold information of value to our readers, especially when rival publications are unconstrained. I don't yet see a clear-cut answer to this dilemma, but we've received some thoughtful suggestions from the staff, and it's one of the problems that we'll be wrestling with in the coming weeks.
Best, Bill
It is much harder to slam this guy when he obviously made an effort to admit mistakes and promise to rectify the situation. It is so much easier to go after bush et al. as they arrogantly ignore the realities and forcibly assert their delusions day after day in press conference after press conference. As I'm sure everyone saw, bush could barely bring himself to take
semi-responsibility for the aftermath of Katrina.
While I appreciate Keller's effort to come clean, there were many warnings that Judy Miller was an advocate not a journalist, but for some unexplainable reason he completely ignored these predictions. I think the most cathartic thing Keller could do now is publicly fire Judy Miller. That would make a statement much more effectively than a thousand heart-felt apology letters.