What do you know, and from Howie the Putz too

Judy Miller, shows the need for another conference on blogger ethics. Howard Kurtz has actually dug his teeth in (it might help that it involves the Post's major prestige competitor).

First we hear from enabler and general dolt Claudia Payne:

Claudia Payne, a Times editor and friend of Miller, said the reporter "cooperated to the best of her ability under the circumstances." Payne said much of the criticism "is based on perceptions of Judy that are uninformed. Some of the declarations about high-handedness and trampling on people are simply not what I've experienced."

Payne is a disgrace. I saw her tired act yesterday on Putz's CNN show and it was sad.

Here's someone who would disagree with Payne...strongly:

Others disagree. Craig Pyes, a former contract writer for the Times who teamed up with Miller for a series on al Qaeda, complained about her in a December 2000 memo to Times editors and asked that his byline not appear on one piece.

"I'm not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller," wrote Pyes, who now writes for the Los Angeles Times. He added: "I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her. . . . She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies," and "tried to stampede it into the paper."

There's your First Amendment Award Winner!

Hey, Lou Dobbs, how you feeling about your defense and clubby interview with her now?

And added to this is this little nugget:

There is one enormous journalism scandal hidden in Judith Miller's Oct. 16th first person article about the (perhaps lesser) CIA leak scandal. And that is Ms. Miller's revelation that she was granted a DoD security clearance while embedded with the WMD search team in Iraq in 2003.

This is as close as one can get to government licensing of journalists and the New York Times (if it knew) should never have allowed her to become so compromised.

This, following on the heel of Armstrong Williams further shows just how far the Bush Administration will go to subvert public discourse. Under the by-line of being a "journalist" Judy Miller, a fellow traveler was allowed access to classified info in return for scoops and spin favorable to the administration. Better get out those 14-points in defining a fascist state again. She wasn't paid in cash for all we know (and given the Bush track record who would be surprised?) but she was paid off in something even more insidious, information. Miller was not some columnist, with a known point-of-view, she was purportedly a journalist who would go only where the facts took them. But the facts came from one source only -- the government mouthpiece.

All in the name of being the Queen of all Iraq.

So Sulzberger and Keller defended a person who sold her soul -- who sold their paper down the river.

Here is your handi-work Judy!