Bill Keller speaks out on NYT misleading pre-Iraq War coverage

[NNN0LHI]

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201106030027

June 03, 2011 2:24 pm ET by Joe Strupp

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller says one of his biggest mistakes as editor was not addressing the paper's misleading pre-Iraq War coverage sooner, including the reporting of former Times writer Judy Miller.

Keller tells Media Matters that he is "not at all" surprised that Miller ended up at the "conservative" Fox News Channel after she left the Times under a cloud of controversy related to her Iraq reporting.

Keller, who announced Thursday that in September he will leave the post he has held since July 2003, said: "Judy was the author of a lot of those stories, and I should have dealt with the stories and with her I think as the sort of first order of business when I took the job rather than waiting until the following year."

Keller was referring to the unusual editor's note the Times published on May 26, 2004, in which it admitted many of its pre-war stories about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- a number of which were reported by Miller -- misrepresented the situation before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

[leveymg]

1. Keller and Miller used to share a beach house and vacation together. Conflict of interest. Keller

should have resigned from the NYT in 2003, once it was obvious that Miller had been playing a role in a neocon disinformation program run out of Cheney's office and the Pentagon.

[EFerrari]

2. He tries to make it a Judy Miller problem.

But it was also a John Burns problem and a Bill Keller problem. He's still splitting hairs.

I hope this new lady is better because Keller was a disaster.

[malaise]

3. Too late Fugger

May you suffer from guilt to the grave.

[snot]

4. As Napoleon said,

" . . . Napoleon . . . said that it wasn't necessary to completely suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay the news until it no longer mattered."
-- attributed by PRWatch at http://www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html , to Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1991), p. xvii.

If I could figure out it by listening to the BBC, Keller could have figured it out, too.