Judith Miller of the New York Times played an enormous role in promoting Ahmed Chalabi’s lies. She was at one time listed as an expert by Middle East Forum, a think tank run by Daniel Pipes and William Kristol, and has coauthored a book with Laurie Mylroie, an anti-Saddam obsessive no longer taken seriously by much of anybody. She has been represented by the literary agent Eleana Banador, whose clients are almost without exception neocons. She really should never have been allowed to work for the Times.
She’s been under fire for inaccurate, dishonest, and biased reporting for some time, and recently the New York Times has very timidly started to acknowlege that maybe her reporting wasn’t really all that hot.
She is married to Jason Epstein, one of the founders of the New York Review of Books (though no longer active there), and judging by her bio pic she’s a reasonably hot second wife. Epstein’s first wife remains an editor at TNYRB, which recently published a devastating article about Miller’s shoddy work for the Times.
One of the oddest things about Miller is that when she first came to Washington she was working for The Progressive, the weeniest of weeny liberal magazines. She moved to the Times in 1977.
As much as any single American outside the government, Miller deserves the blame for our disastrous Iraq incursion. It will be interesting to see whether there will be any real consequences.
Did she fuck her way to the top? Nobody likes Judith!
Steve Gilliard: it’s unusual for a reporter to be as thoroughly disliked as Miller is.
Perhaps her primary loyalty was not to journalism: one proposed alternative
Miller’s father ran a Mafia hangout (see more below)
More on the Riviera / Marine Room Mafia hangout
Part I of a series on Miller; Part II; Part III; Part IV.
LINKS:
Massing’s New York Review of Books Article exposing Miller
Miller’s Husband’s Ex-wife is an Editor of the New York Review of Books
Editor and Publisher on Miller
Columbia Journalism Review on Miller
Miller and the Middle East Forum
Miller published in the Middle East Forum