When the newsreporter makes the news...

I feel sorry for the New York Times... this is likely the Watergate of the Bush administration (unless somebody starts doing his/her job and nails them on the Iraq and Downing Street Memos), and they're in a position where their reporting is going to be received with scrutiny and skepticism due to their role in the investigation led by Special Prosecuter Patrick Fitzgerald.

Not that it matters much to me. I got this from the Washington Post, as usual:

Bennett, Miller's lawyer, said he argued with Times executives that her agreement with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to testify before a grand jury did not entitle her to put "in the newspaper" her off-the-record conversations with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

Disputing a lengthy Times story last Sunday in which Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said that "this car had her hand on the wheel," Bennett said Sulzberger and Keller "were making it very clear what they thought she should do. . . . She may be controversial in some things, but the bottom line is she spent 85 days in jail, mostly on a principle which the New York Times fully encouraged her to assert." He added that the executives left the final decision to Miller.

Bennett's comments, in response to a reporter's inquiry, followed a memo to the Times staff in which Keller distanced himself from Miller even while acknowledging several mistakes on his part.

"Until Fitzgerald came after her," Keller wrote, "I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the . . . whisper campaign" against Joe Wilson, the husband of CIA operative Valerie Plame. "I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact." Citing a 2003 conversation with Miller that was recalled by Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman, Keller wrote: "Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement."

Further, Keller said, "if I had known the details of Judy's entanglement with Libby, I'd have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises."

Hm. To be continued later.