corrente

It's a three-ring circus! After Miller gets done clowning, Okrent comes on, and then Sulzberger. And none of them talk about the circus elephant: The way the Times, and so much of the SCLM, enabled the Iraq war by serving as "house organs" for Bush.

so far the public editor has looked the other way in failing to comment on the damning recent statement by Sulzberger on the Miller/WMD controversy. It constituted an indictment of the way he, and Miller's editors, saw her role in covering WMD and the war from "the inside" (reported at E&P Online, March 22).

Sulzberger admitted that Miller's sources were wrong "absolutely." But then "the administration was wrong ... So I don't blame Judy Miller for the lack of finding weapons of mass destruction. I blame the administration for believing its own story line to such a point that they weren't prepared to question the authenticity of what they were told."

Well, if [Miller's sources] weren't going to question themselves, wasn't it the role of the press to question them -- instead of so often acting as stenographers for inside sources and defectors? No one is blaming Miller for not finding WMD in Iraq (though she tried mightily while she was there), but rather for hyping their existence before and after the war. The Times too often swallowed the government's narrative on these weapons of mass disappearance.

And some high-placed intelligence analysts (not to mention other members of the media and vast numbers of the American public) surely believed in the authenticity of what the Times was telling them. One imagines a circle of blind animals, linked to one another: The Times tied to the tail ohttp://209.11.49.220/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000477825f the government which was tied to the tail of Iraqi defectors who were tied to the tail of the Times.
(via Editor and Publisher, from American Leftist)

A "circle of blind animals" ... Well put.

Fortunately, all the institutional problems that led of Miller's stenography have now been fixed, and current coverage of the Iraq war, the 9/11 commission, and the various criminal investigations under way against the Bush administration are in no way affected. Oh, wait...