You have to wonder about a journalist like Judy Miller and what, exactly, makes her tick. And yet, as compelling a study as that might be, it doesn't really matter, because the net effect of kneepad journalism is the enabling of unification of the powerful and the press and that can, in the worst cases, lead to totalitarian control. After reading the Sunday New York Times articles about Judy Miller and by Judy Miller and her role in Plamegate, it terrifies me how an institution like the Times can be completely coopted by a single reporter with the hubris of Judith Miller. She was and is a reporter completely in the thrall of an administration which continually demonstrates that truth is irrelevant and that only perception and image matter, because the acquisition of power is everything. I don't expect political types to care about truth, but I do expect the New York Times, the alleged liberal mouthpiece, to report what it knows to be true.
But it didn't. Its publisher and chief editor allowed Judith Miller to become a handmaiden to the most brazen corruption of the federal government in our time, a corruption which has now led to nearly 2000 American military deaths and tens upon tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties and hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, much of which is now in the pockets of war profiteers. These are lives stolen for no noble cause, money stolen for no good purpose, all of it taken from a future which will be far, far worse for what these criminals have done.
And yet Judy Miller got a First Amendment award from a group of journalists today.
May Edward R. Murrow forgive them all.
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