Judy Miller thinks the bloggers did her in?

Crossposed on Dailykos.

Ok, put down your coffee cup - you don't want to spray the cat. In a Vanity Fair article written by Marie Brenner, Judy Miller (the New York Times reporter who was pretty much Ahmad Chalabi and the Bush Administrations stenographer on non-existent Iraq WMD's) says that she lost her credibility because those darn bloggers gave her a bad name.

The ones tossing the fire were those dastardly--but unnamed--bloggers, according to Miller. Upon returning to New York later in May, Miller met with the Times' two top editors, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, who were then battling a staff revolt triggered by the Jayson Blair scandal. They acknowledged the "flak" her stories had gotten and told her foreign editor Roger Cohen did not want her to go back to Iraq. Cohen opposed her return because, as he tells Brenner, "There were concerns about her sources and her sourcing." Still, Miller managed a quick trip to Iraq.

For those who don't remember (yeah, right) one of the biggest stories of last year, which by the way is ongoing, Judy Miller was the one reporter who did jail time for refusing to divulge her sources on the Plame-gate story to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Now she says, her troubles are all our fault?

From Slate...

In June, back in New York, "Miller realized that she was losing her authority" inside the Times. "None of my colleagues ever spoke to me about my reporting. But they would say, 'We don't want to work with her.' "

In August, Bill Keller replaced Raines as executive editor, and according to Miller, he told her, "You are radioactive. ... You can see it in the blogs."

However...

"I'm pretty sure I never said any such thing," Keller tells Brenner.

Que? Not the first time Judy's had a problem with truthiness. But wait, it gets worse.

Miller: "The bloggers were without editing, without a way for people to understand what was good, what was well reported--to distinguish between the straight and the slanderous. Things would get instantly picked up, magnified, and volumized."

Slate: (Sounds more like what my hairdresser does with my thinning locks. But never mind.)

Ok, so let me get this straight, experienced, educated reporters from the "Paper of Record" were afraid to consort with poor Judy Miller because bloggers (who she doesn't name - but one can easily guess she means people like us, Josh Micah Marshall at TalkingpointsMemo and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake ) regularly ripped her apart for spreading lies to the American people that led us into an unwarranted illegal and endless War in Iraq?

And the main problem with bloggers is that they don't have editors? (Has she ever read a blog with active and boistrous comments, which invariably will cause a good and responsible blogger to adjust or correct any "magnification and volumization" in their stories?)

Nah, I don't think so either.

Say what you will about New York Times reporters and editors, but nobody with half a mind would ever call them uncritical guzzlers of blog bilge. I don't know what's more astonishing--that Miller said this with a straight face or that Brenner ran it without comment.

Not that progressive bloggers didn't already have a few dozen reasons (WMD's, Plame) to slag Judy Miller - here's yet another one. If she thought the blogs had made her radioactive before -- she's about to do live through a reenactment of The China Syndrome now.

And I really don't think Judy's part will mirror Jane Fonda's role of intrepid investigative reporter in that scenario. No, Judy's the core with her rods of lies exposed.

If there's any truth to Miller's claim at all, I'd consider it a credit to the blogs that they managed to call her out on her bullshit while she was reporting fabrications and lies. Something the great New York Times and all their "Editors" should have done, but didn't.

(BTW Vanity Fair's Marie Brenner is a good friend of Miller's ("Surprise, Surprise!") who helped organize her fairwell dinner before she went to jail - and in the end Miller seems to be doing just fine as an editor for the Miami Herald, well enough that she turned down a job to work for the Associated Press in order to become an investigator for Kroll and Associates.

Oh, poor Judy....how low those damned bloggers have brought you. /snark)

Vyan