A letter I didn't send to the NY Times ombudsmen re: Judith Miller

[scottxyz]

Why bother sending it to them? If they wanted to do something about the mess they've made, they'd've done it by now. It gets more impact sharing it directly on the web - rather than letting the Times ombusdsmen throw it into the "circular" file.

I'm getting tired of telling the "media" how they're screwing up and we're now going "around" them - I'd rather just GO around them and be done with it. Eventually, they will wither away - or learn a few tricks from the web.

Dear Mssrs. Daniel Okrent and Arthur Bovino ([e-mail]):

Sorry to keep harping on this, but it's important. Quite simply: we now know that we were lied into the war in Iraq by George W. Bush - and that one of his chief enablers was Judith Miller. Your newspaper, which may still be the newspaper of record in the US, splashed lies across its headlines for months and in no small way helped land the country in this 550-million-dollar-a-week mess with no end in sight, and perhaps more than anyone else in the media, Ms. Miller enabled this deception.

Petty plagiarist and liar Jayson Blair is gone - but what he did was arguably far less egregious than what Judith Miller has been exposed as doing: telling grandiose lies to get our nation into a war. As long as she is still on the payroll, you look like collaborators.

To quote from the Supreme Court decision which allowed the Times to publish the Pentagon papers:

"Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."

The rules of the game are changing rapidly, and I would think that your shareholders' value and the worth of your "brand" can only continue to erode if you gain a reputation for being a mouthpiece of a corrupt government.

This is the kind of writing any web-savvy person can read about your paper now:
http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2004/12/blair-and-miller.html

This stuff is out there, and tens of thousands of people are reading it every day. In a way, it constitutes a "scoop" - juicy information available only from your competition. Juicy information about how the Times can't be trusted.

In the long run, it of course matters little to me personally whether the Times gets its act together or not - I'm not a shareholder, and as I have repeatedly told you: after being an assiduous, inveterate reader of your paper for about 20 years, I no longer buy the Times, nor do I ever even bother to visit the website. As we know, the Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it. Thousands of former readers have already routed around you and no longer get their news from the Times.

Maybe you can't do anything about it - maybe corporations and free information are simply incompatible, and it took the internet for us to finally notice that.

[otohara]

1. Have You Read Salon.com Today

http://www.salon.com/

[ashling]

3. care to

tell us what it is about, or at least to cut and paste at least a snippet of the article?

It is really rather rude to cut and paste a link to a source without taking the extra half second to paste some info as well.

[otohara]

10. Sorry, I Got Several

alerts and didn't have the time.

[scottxyz]

4. I think the stevgilliard.blogspot.com link links to the salon.com article

nt

[scottxyz]

6. Here's a quote from that Salon article you mentioned

Looking too closely into the Miller affair, then, would raise the question of how America's leading newspaper, which prides itself on its impartiality and its "non-crusading" character, was so readily hypnotized by a mendacious administration that it splashed that government's most spectacular untruths across the front page, over and over again. This question goes well beyond Judith Miller or Howell Raines or Bill Keller, all of whom have to look in the mirror every day and wonder to what extent they are responsible for a misguided war that has cost thousands of human lives and now feels like a bottomless disaster. Jayson Blair was just a weird kid who told some fibs.

It's easy for a book reviewer to sit here and second-guess the Times' reporting on Iraq long after the fact. The individual who bears ultimate responsibility for the Iraq war is George W. Bush, and he might well have gone ahead with his long-desired invasion if the Times had never swallowed any of Chalabi and Wolfowitz's bunkum (and, for that matter, if 9/11 had never happened). Of course, you or I didn't know that when Colin Powell gave his fateful audiovisual presentation to the United Nations in February 2003, he was pretty much pulling it out of his butt. Almost every reporter has been hoodwinked by a source and, if he or she is honest, can imagine being swept up in scoop-fever to the point of making Miller's mistakes, egregious as they were.

No, the fundamental question about the future of the New York Times, in the Keller era and beyond, is whether it can recover a sense of true impartiality and independence, or whether its editors and managers have become so snuggly with power, so seduced by the corroded political discourse of our time, that they define "impartiality" as a point of perpetual, semi-neutral waffledom, halfway across the infinitesimal distance between Joe Lieberman and John McCain.

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/12/28/nyt/index.html
(requires watching a brief ad, or subscription)

[Jo March]

2. I think that you should send it anyway

That's a great letter. You are quite the eloquent writer.

[Jo March]

5. You inspired me!

I sent this (with one line blatantly stolen from your letter):

Dear Mssrs. Daniel Okrent and Arthur Bovino ([e-mail] ):

Americans understand that we were lied to about the WMDs in Iraq. We know that there weren't any WMDs in Iraq. We also know that George W. Bush and his admistration lied to us about those WMDs to get us into war with Iraq. One of his best worker bees in the spread of those lies? Judith Miller.

Judith Miller told lies, outright lies, to the American public. The American public put their trust in your reporter because the New York Times surely would not employ someone who would tell such lies, especially with so much at stake. Ah, but you did employ such a person and you still do. Why is that?

What Ms. Miller did was reprehensible and almost unforgiveable. Thousands of innocent people are now dead - 1300 of those are our own troops. Ms. Miller's hands are covered in blood

Are Jayson Blair's crimes are worse than Judith Miller's? No.

Is Judith Miller still on your payroll? Yes.

This is the kind of writing any web-savvy person can read about your paper now:
http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2004/12/blair-and-mil...

And these stories will continue to grow and spread until all Americans and even the international readers of your paper know the truth: The New York Times can not be trusted to tell the truth.

As long as you continue to keep people like Judith Miller on your payroll, you are guilty of spreading the lies that helped propel the U.S. into war. The war was wrong then and it's wrong now.

Do not employ those who would lie without conscience. Relieve Judith Miller of her job immediately.

[scottxyz]

7. Nice!

Very much to the point!

[Crunchy Frog]

8. I think you should send them the letter.

Circulate it around the internet as much as you can, but let them have a copy of it as well. I think it's important for them to hear that sort of thing, to know that thinking people are on to them.

I won't purchase their paper anymore, but I don't have the same ability to put my thoughts into words that you have, so I haven't tried to write to them to tell them why.

I hope you'll reconsider. It really is an excellent letter.

[yardwork]

9. Good letter! You are on to something - get their competition interested

The Times won't be able to ignore the story about how The Times got hoodwinked when other major papers are covering it.

The internet is a good place to start.

I've dropped my online subscription to The Times. Couldn't take it anymore.