Source:
SalonJudith Miller used to be a superstar. She was a major reporter at the New York Times for decades -- at the DC bureau, in Cairo, in Paris, special correspondent to the Persian Gulf, embedded with a special unit in Iraq. She had the best sources. She had amazing scoops. Now she's writing -- on contract, not full-time -- for Newsmax, a goofy right-wing magazine where conservatives you've never heard of (and John Stossel, apparently) report, constantly, that Barack Obama is bad and unpopular. It's a steep fall, and it couldn't have happened to a worse journalist.
Since her early days at the Times, when she inserted CIA misinformation into a piece on Libya, she's always been a tool of power. She was the voice of the Defense Department, embedded at the Times. She was hyping bullshit stories about Iraq's WMD capabilities as far back as 1998, and in the run-up to the war, her front-page scoops were cited by the Bush administration as evidence that Saddam needed to be taken out, right away.
Lying exile grifter Ahmad Chalabi fed her the worst of the nonsense designed to push America into toppling Saddam Hussein (and giving Iraq to him), and she pushed that nonsense into the newspaper of record. She got everything wrong, and for some insane reason, she remained employed at the Times until 2005, when she negotiated her separation from her longtime professional home.
There was also the extended farce in which she went to jail to "protect" Scooter Libby, who had given her permission to "reveal" his role in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name, which did net her some sort of "First Amendment award" (for excellence in the field of comforting the powerful), and finally embarrassed the Times enough to get rid of her.
Read more:
http://www.salon.com/news/media_criticism/?story=/politics/war_room/2010/12/30/judy_miller_newsmax