All the President’s Friends

Miller’s gone, and Woodward is (voila!) forgiven. And the editors of our leading newspapers are clueless about the respect they’ve lost.

By Todd Gitlin
Issue Date: 01.05.06

“Like most people at the times,” New York Times executive editor Bill Keller told a Princeton gathering on November 14, “I am suffering from a serious case of Judy Miller fatigue.” Aren’t we all? But before we succumb, a deeper look would be timely.

The Miller case turns out to be part of an epidemic in need of a proper diagnosis. The very day Keller was criticizing Miller’s WMD coverage while congratulating the paper for airing its dirty laundry, Bob Woodward, American journalism’s knight in tarnished armor, was giving a deposition to the grand jury called by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. A couple of days later Woodward published a statement in The Washington Post -- one that read more like a legal-deposition-cum-bureaucratic memo than a journalistic report -- revealing that “current or former Bush administration officials” had, in a “casual and offhand” manner, told him about Joseph Wilson’s wife and her CIA job in June 2003, before Wilson’s famous Times op-ed and before Robert Novak piped the leak into his column.