Hers wouldn’t be the first comment-less blog on the right or the left, many well-loved by the right and left. Characterizing her as “spewing” comes back to the pariah thing.

If you want “spewing”, buy Mary Mapes book, which also doesn’t allow comments. But people, like document experts Mapes lies about, can still respond anyway.

Love Jay’s note about comments too. you can spew all you want, but if you’re not interacting, you’re only spewing…and, after awhile, who will really care? Unless she starts putting up pictures of herself in lingerie and talking about how much she loves her Manolos, eventually people will lose interest.

And if Miller can’t deal with comments…well, as an old sage once said: if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Don’t think standing 50 ft. from the stove will make a difference.

But the salient feature of blogging, which Seth points out above re: the Pajamas Media keynote, is that the first small step one takes on the path to blogging is sucking up to the blog media.

Ever see Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Same idea.

For the record, I came here via JOHO the blog (why I’m not kicking back watching Rita Cosby report from the Bunny Ranch in Nevada is an excellent question). And David at JOHO passes this kidney stone to us:

Jeff Jarvis raises an interesting question in passing: Do the terms of the agreement prevent either side from disclosing the terms of the agreement or, worse, what actually happened? Either restriction would be bad news for a news organization. How about some meta-transparency from the Times on that question?

Is there something more we need to know at this point? And did Jeff actually raise that question in passing?

Nope.

Judith Miller, like every other reporter before her on that beat, reported what most intelligence agencies (domestic and abroad) and politicians (Democratic and Republican) believed to be the status of Saddam’s WMD program.

In the course of her reporting, she committed a few ethical lapses which actually seem to be quite common among journalists. For instance, intentionally misleading readers as to the identity of her sources: other journalists, meanwhile, have no hesitation in dubbing unnamed partisans activists “bipartisan experts”.

But she happened to be on the WMD story at the point that the left decided to try rewriting history (and, unfortunately, getting away with it at the moment), and pretend that the only man who ever believed Saddam had WMD was George W Bush (a huge lie), and that WMD was the *only* criteria offered for entering Iraq (another huge lie). The partisans accusing her of lying, in other words, are doing so in the midst of world-class whoppers themselves.

She has, thus, become a convenient punching bag for the left. Despite the universal belief of Saddam’s WMD aspirations predating the Bush administration, the astounding story from the left is that Miller is a right-wing operative who made up WMD in order to justify the administration’s lies. The only way this could actually be true, though, is if Miller owned a time machine and was able to go back to the 90s and peddle the story to all the people who talked about it back then, make her way back to the future, and hope that nobody remembers her original covert time travel operation.

I have no idea what Miller’s actual politics are. I have a strong suspicion, though, that she is anything but the right winger that many suppose. She’s probably at least as moderately liberal as any average NYT reporter, but the left have become like sharks… a little blood in the water and they go nuts.

The confusion about her politics I gather from the story about her return to the newsroom from jail… she expected her liberal brethren to applaud her actions, the usual liberal defense of the press by going to jail rather than reveal sources, but was left baffled by their indifference and anger. That’s not the reaction of a reporter who is knowingly conservative in an extremely liberal office working as an administration hack. She’s probably the last person to know that she was being set up as a sacrifical lamb.

As a “wingnut” I’m oddly unmoved by Miller’s departure, because she’s never ever been a factor in conservative thought or politics. Take her out of the leadup to Iraq, and absolutely nothing would be different. She’s just another NYT reporter. So what you’re witnessing is something like a shadow puppet show, a drama pushed forward by angry partisans, destroying a woman’s career and reputation along the way.

One more plea in favor of licensing “journalism”. That’s what the MSM wants, can’t have those PJ clad amateurs gettin’ ideas, right?

34%!!

*Now* is it clear why she’s doing the keynote for Pajamas Media?

This story’ had more twists than a Twizzler. Even better, this is only a subplot. We’re maybe halfway through the book. FWIW, the second half will profoundly influence how we interpret the first. Just my $0.02…

Journalists, as much as I respect their profession, are hired to find out whatever they can about whatever they are assigned to cover, and to relay the data accurately to their employers, who are in the business of passing it on to the rest of us.

Ms. Miller’s grandstanding does not impress me.