Why On the Media rocks: Garfield guts Judy

[warrens]

BOB GARFIELD: Well, then forgive, please, the "do you still beat your wife" question, but if you had no intention of using that attribution that you negotiated, then why have the negotiation to begin with? I mean -

JUDITH MILLER: 'Cause I was interested in listening to what the man had to say.

BOB GARFIELD: So one promise you make to your source is so important that you'll go to jail to honor it but another is just a trick to get information.

JUDITH MILLER: No, it's not a trick. It's called reporting.

BOB GARFIELD: Doesn't that take the air out of your claim to be acting on principle?

JUDITH MILLER: Excuse me. You want to argue with me, fine. But that's the way that I conducted this interview and the way things unfolded. There was no story, so we'll never know whether you're right or I'm right, but there is one difference. Mr. Libby has never been identified in any way, shape, or form as anything other than an administration official in one of my stories. And moreover, in 28 years of journalism I have never, ever been accused by my paper of misattributing a source, not once.

SNIP

BOB GARFIELD: - to put the question in plain language, Judy, were you played for a chump by these sources, Ahmed Chalabi in particular?

JUDITH MILLER: You know, first of all I - I'm not going to be insulted by your question, but I think that the sources that I relied on were reliable. They had been reliable in the past. I'm not going to discuss who they were, though many of them were actually identified by name in my stories. Moreover, those stories were heavily edited. They just didn't dance their way into the New York Times. As the editor's note acknowledged, everybody's wrong if your sources are wrong.

BOB GARFIELD: There is this kind of archetype in journalism of the State Department reporter who takes to smoking pipes and wearing tweed and the police reporter who puts lights in his car, and other reporters who become so associated with the beat that they're on that they cease to be distinguishable from the people they're actually covering. Were you so immersed in spooks that you sort of started seeing yourself as a spook yourself?

JUDITH MILLER: Oh, hardly. You know, I'm a journalist. Those lines don't get blurred. But yeah, I do hang out with sources. If I was hanging out with fellow journalists, I usually wasn't learning anything. If I was hanging out with, you know, national security policy wonks, I tended to learn something.

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_111105_judith.html

[Loonman]

1. She's no longer a journalist

She's a flunkie, a stooge for Rove & Cheney.

[warrens]

2. If you can listen to the tape

She's way obnoxious, defensive, humorless, shrill...name it. This is one unpleasant person. And Garfield gets right in her face, politely. I kept waiting for her to hang up on him.