NYT Smackdown, Round 1: Judy Miller vs. Maureen Dowd
 

     Maureen Dowd strikes the first blow against Judy Miller in her Saturday column, "Woman Of Mass Destruction," which opens with this piece of poisoned candy: "I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp. The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy -- her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur -- have never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types."

     Dowd continues: "She never knew when to quit. That was her talent and her flaw. Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, she was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers. She more than earned her sobriquet 'Miss Run Amok.' Judy's stories about W.M.D. fit too perfectly with the White House's case for war."

     Dowd, a former reporter, provides a bit of newsroom grit: "It also doesn't seem credible that Judy wouldn't remember a Marvel comics name like 'Valerie Plame.' Nor does it seem credible that she doesn't know how the name got into her notebook and that, as she wrote, she 'did not believe the name came from Mr. Libby.'"

     But is Dowd a credible person to decide who and who isn't credible?

     Remember her dishonest deletion of a quote by Bush in a column from May 2003, a ham-handed attempt to make him look naïve about the dangers of Al Qaeda.

     What Dowd said Bush said: "Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. 'Al Qaeda is on the run,' President Bush said last week. 'That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated…They're not a problem anymore.'"

     As Robert Cox pointed out, this is what Bush actually said: "Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they're not a problem anymore. And we'll stay on the hunt. To make sure America is a secure country, the Al Qaeda terrorists have got to understand it doesn't matter how long it's going to take, they will be brought to justice."

     It’s clear Bush is only talking about the top Al Qaeda operatives that "are either jailed or dead" as being "not a problem anymore" -- not the organization itself. Dowd dishonestly deleted that sentence and the first three words of the next one to make Bush " say" Al Qaeda was no longer a threat."

If you have TimesSelect, you can read Dowd's attack on Miller here.

Round 2: Judy Miller vs. Calame
 

     Judy Miller responds to Times ombudsman Barney Calame's criticism in his Sunday column, where he accuses Miller of taking "journalistic shortcuts" and addresses the "troubling ethical issue" of whether or not Miller held some kind of government security clearance.

     Miller's response is blunt: "I'm dismayed by your essay today. You accuse me of taking journalistic 'shortcuts' without presenting evidence of what you mean and rely on unsubstantiated innuendo about my reporting. While you posted Bill Keller’s sanitized, post-lawyered version of the ugly, inaccurate memo to the staff he circulated Friday, which accused me of 'misleading' an editor and being 'entangled' with I. Lewis Libby, you declined to post the answers I sent you to six questions that we touched on during our interview Thursday. Had you done so, readers could have made their own assessment of my conduct in what you headlined as 'the Miller mess.'"

     She continues: "I fail to see why I am responsible for my editors' alleged failure to do some 'digging' into my confidential sources and the notebooks. From the start, the legal team that the Times provided me knew who my source was and had access to my notes. I never refused to answer questions or provide any information they requested. No one indicated they had doubts about the stand I took to go to jail. Your essay clearly implies that the Times and I did something wrong in waging a battle that we did not choose. I strongly disagree. What did I do wrong? Your essay does not say. You may disapprove of my earlier reporting on Weapons of Mass Destruction. But what did the delayed publication of the editor’s note on that reporting have to do with the decision I made over a year later, which the paper fully supported, to protect our confidential sources? I remain proud of my decision to go to jail rather than reveal the identity of a source to whom I had pledged confidentiality, even if he happened to work for the Bush White House."

Here's Miller's response in full.

Round 3: Judy Miller vs. Bill Keller
 

     Executive Editor Bill Keller criticizes reporter Judy Miller in Saturday's story by Katharine Seelye: "In his first direct criticism of Ms. Miller, Mr. Keller said she 'seems to have misled' the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, Philip Taubman, when she was asked by Mr. Taubman if she was one of at least six Washington journalists who had reportedly been told that Valerie Plame was a C.I.A. operative."

     Seelye gets the other side: "Ms. Miller said in an interview that Mr. Keller's statements were 'seriously inaccurate.' She also provided The Times with a copy of a memorandum she had sent to Mr. Keller in response. 'I certainly never meant to mislead Phil, nor did I mislead him,' she wrote to Mr. Keller, referring to Mr. Taubman."

     Keller admits the large role PR played in the paper's initial silence: 'It felt somehow unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors,' Mr. Keller wrote. But by waiting more than a year, he acknowledged, 'we allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, we fear, we fostered an impression that The Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers,' he wrote."

For the rest of Seelye on the Miller-Keller fight, click here.

Are Unions the Only Hope for Jobs for Blacks?
 

    Economics reporter Louis Uchitelle is often gloomy on his subject, and his front page Week in Review piece, "Labor's Lost -- For Blacks, A Dream In Decline," is no exception. The text box is equally downcast: "Unions helped lift them into the middle class. Now, job losses are hitting African-Americans hard."

     Yet Uchitelle's actual article has just one genetic sentence about actual black joblessness, noting blacks are faring relatively poorly during the economic recovery. Uchitelle is far more worried about lack of black union membership, which isn't a measure of black employment at all.

     Uchitelle is apparently conflating the lack of black jobs with the lack of blacks in unions, even though how much of the job problem can be blamed on lack of unions, as opposed to education and immigration matters, is debatable.

     "The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. set forth the goal. Civil rights and union membership were to be intertwined. The labor movement, Dr. King wrote in 1958, 'must concentrate its powerful forces on bringing economic emancipation to white and Negro by organizing them together in social equality.' That happened in the 1960's and 1970's. But then unions lost bargaining power and members. And while labor leaders called attention to the overall decline, few took notice that blacks were losing much more ground than whites. In the last five years, that trend accelerated. Despite a growing economy, the number of African-Americans in unions has fallen by 14.4 percent since 2000, while white membership is down 5.4 percent."

     Uchitelle, who favors a rise in the minimum wage and more government involvement in health care, finally broaches the subject of past and present racism in unions, but only lightly: "Unions, like other institutions in the post-World War II economy, were slow to admit African-Americans to the club, and there is still resistance today in some of the higher-paying skilled trades. Yet blacks came to rely on unions even more than working class whites did to gain entry into the middle class, through jobs that gave them annual wage increases and company-paid health insurance and pensions."

     Uchitelle keeps the focus on the racial angle: "African-Americans make up an even higher percentage of the union's members at the operations that the Bush administration is turning over to private contractors. These include laundries at veterans' hospitals, ground maintenance and food service at government installations and security guards at numerous federal buildings -- much of it work that paid only $15,000 to $20,000 a year, but that came with pensions and health insurance."

For more Uchitelle on blacks and unions, click here.

Another Anti-Bush "Mission Accomplished" for Bumiller
 

     White House Reporter Elisabeth Bumiller follows Bush to the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. for the dedication of the Air Force One Pavilion.

     This being Bumiller, she can't let the innocuous ceremony go without an anti Bush-crack taken from current events, or in this case, events from over two years ago: "Laura Bush and Nancy Reagan were at the president's side for the dedication. In brief remarks before he spoke, Mrs. Reagan recalled that on her husband's last flight on Air Force One, home to California, his staff poured Champagne and shouted, "Mission accomplished, Mr. President!' On Friday those words seemed an echo of Mr. Bush's own 'mission accomplished' moment, now regretted by his aides, in which a banner with that message hung above him on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln when, in May 2003, he declared major military operations in Iraq at an end."

To read the rest of Bumiller on the ceremony honoring Ronald Reagan, click here.

Shielding Patrick Fitzgerald
 

     In case Republicans were thinking of criticizing "Plame-gate" prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in any way resembling how Clinton and fellow Democrats went after independent counsel Ken Starr, the Times files a helpful headline over its Saturday front page story: "Leak Prosecutor Is Called Exacting and Apolitical."

     Reporters Scott Shane and David Johnston relate: "In 13 years prosecuting mobsters and terrorists in New York, Patrick J. Fitzgerald earned a public reputation for meticulous preparation, a flawless memory and an easy eloquence. Only his colleagues knew that these orderly achievements emerged from the near-total anarchy of his office, where the relentless Mr. Fitzgerald often slept during big cases."

     They go on to say that "unlike Mr. Walsh and Mr. Starr, both former judges, Mr. Fitzgerald is a career prosecutor. And as a Bush administration appointee, he is less vulnerable to attack from the White House. 'It will be much harder than it was with Starr to say this is a partisan prosecution,' Ms. Harriger [an expert on independent counsels] said."

     As Byron York of National Review says, "But the Times seems intent on fighting the last war. Who has accused Fitzgerald of political bias? Perhaps someone, but it hasn't been a prominent complaint. Fitzgerald has been criticized by members of the press for pursuing reporters to testify about their confidential sources."

     The Times does eventually note: "Some attorneys who admire Mr. Fitzgerald detect a hint of zealotry or inflexibility in his approach and wonder whether what works with terrorism translates to an inside-the-Beltway case involving White House officials and their multilayered relationships with journalists. In Mr. Fitzgerald's world, a former colleague recalled, it was pretty clear who had black hats and who had white hats, there was not a lot of gray."

For more from Shane and Johnston on prosecutor Fitzgerald, click here.