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October 18, 2005

Judy Miller: Another Perspective on Sources

From Christopher Dickey in Newsweek [via]:

The righteous response is that such stories should not be made public until we can report them from the bottom up, not just the top down. That’s what Craig Pyes believes, and one of many reasons he wrote a scathing memo to the Times editors back in 2000, when he was forced to team up with Judy on a reporting project about Al Qaeda that eventually won a Pulitzer. "I'm not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller," he wrote in the memo, which recently leaked to The Washington Post. "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." Worse still, she had "tried to stampede it into the paper."

But Craig, whom I’ve known even longer than I’ve known Judy, is an obsessive investigative reporter who spends months or years working on a single project. Currently on contract with The Los Angeles Times, he’s a very rare breed today. Few newspapers, magazines or networks are willing to pay for that kind of high-priced low-volume journalism. It’s so much easier—so much more cost effective—to take mass-produced information off the shelf and embellish it with a few opinions, or just to receive wisdom from the folks in power. Many critics are complaining about all the money that Judy’s case has cost the Times. But maybe they’re missing the point. Think of all the money she saved the Times by getting headlines day after day from top-level sources instead of working on a project year after year just to shoot those sources down.

Of course I’m being ironic. But I’m also serious. Burning Judy won’t light the way to better journalistic standards and ethics in a media marketplace that long ago concluded having access to power is more important than speaking truth to it. Worst of all, there’s very little public demand from the public for solid, prize-winning, and oh-so-expensive investigative reporting from the ground up. American audiences have been conditioned to expect amusement, even in their news. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said recently, “we're the best-entertained and the least-informed people on the face of the earth.”

Posted by timothompson at October 18, 2005 05:53 PM