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Edited on Thu May-27-04 02:20 PM by jpgray
Dear Sir or Madam:
The New York Times is the premier newspaper in this country. It is for this reason many Americans trust the NYT to deliver the highest standard of journalism, and it is for this reason the paper's recent failures in that regard have inspired this letter. Jayson Blair was an embarrassment, but he did not help to cause a war. Jayson Blair may have been lazy and irresponsible, but the products of his indolence and irresponsibility were not touted as reasons for hundreds of Americans to lose their lives, or justification for the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Judith Miller wrote several articles, notably one concerning "centrifuges", and that dreadful headline that blared "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War." Now we know that the "centrifuges" were actually tubes for rockets, and dozens of scientists actually familiar with research and investigation spoke out publicly as to why these aluminum tubes would not be an option for enriching uranium. If Judith Miller had bothered consulting an expert, perhaps that embarrassing drivel would not have appeared to insult the intelligence of everyone who reads your paper--we knew this was false within a few days of it being reported. Would that the editorial office put as much effort into its work.
Another tremendous disappointment came with Ms. Miller's appearances on the news shows. On Jim Lehrer she claimed that evidence offered from Chalabi and an Iraqi she had never met nor interviewed was "more than a smoking gun" and a "silver bullet." Now, I know you pundits love your scripts, but this time you are killing people with them. How either of these stories would constitute any kind of "smoking gun" when the scientific and intelligence communities were dismissing them is just incomprehensible to me. This leaves out the whole Niger flap, wherein the IAEA had debunked the falsified documents in November of 2002 but mainstream coverage of Bush's inclusion of that intelligence in his SOTU address had to wait until after "major combat operations" were over. At any rate, unless Ms. Miller is looking to do the Bush administration's work directly, to blot out the few modest lines of separation which still survive, she is shaming her whole profession and in particular your paper. She is lowering the level of our discourse by pretending that we will not examine her articles--by pretending that no one bothers to check with professionals who know the nature of the facts, who know the nature of a political world where spin and dishonesty are tools of the trade.
She got heavily rolled by Chalabi, by Saeed, by untold numbers of people, and I'll be damned if I will put up with someone doing this. She generated lazy, irresponsible stories that may well have cost people their lives, but she will not be fired. She will not be censured. She will be back on the beat in no time I am sure. Well, it won't be long before the pattern repeats--Ms. Miller will put out another slipshod lazy piece, all your readers will scramble elsewhere to find out what's really going on, and seven months after doing so would make any difference, the editors will have something to say. It's a sad time for journalism in this country.
J.P. Gray
edit: LOL, some errors in there, but I did send it while pissed off.
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