Judith Miller Retires From the N.Y. Times

Controversial New York Times reporter Judith Miller has “retired,” accepting an undisclosed severance package.

Judith Miller Retires From the N.Y. Times (AP)

Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who was first lionized, then vilified by her own newspaper for her role in the CIA leak case, has retired from the Times, the paper announced Wednesday.

Miller, 57, joined the Times in 1977 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for reporting on global terrorism. She said in a letter to readers that she left because she had “become the news.” She had been negotiating a severance deal with the paper for several weeks.

Miller spent 85 days in jail over the summer for refusing to testify about her conversations with a confidential source. But after her release, she was criticized harshly and publicly by Times editors and writers for her actions in the CIA leak case and for her reporting during the run-up to the Iraq war, later discredited, indicating that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

“We are grateful to Judy for her significant personal sacrifice to defend an important journalistic principle,” Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in a statement. “I respect her decision to retire from The Times and wish her well.” The Times declined to disclose details of the severance package, but said the paper had agreed to print a letter from Miller in which she defended herself and explained her reasons for leaving.

She said she could no longer function as a reporter at the paper, given her unwanted status as a news figure. “I have chosen to resign because over the last few months, I have become the news, something a New York Times reporter never wants to be,” Miller wrote, according to e xcerpts from her letter published Wednesday evening on the newspaper’s Web site. Even before her involvement in the CIA case, she added, she had “become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war.”

Well, she apparently has a career as a speaker at big blogger events. (See Roger L. Simon, Jeff Jarvis, and Markos Zuniga for details.)

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James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Herb says:

    Well, Well, one more egotistical self serving reporter has bit the dust. Her part in the CIA leak case will always be suspicous for her “lack of memory” and serving 80 plus days in jail for something she could not recall. Like those before her and those that will surely follow, the American public will be better off without. She does follow in some very prominant footsteps though, like Mary Mapes, the NYT reporter that plagerized others (can’t recall his name)and others just like her. The liberals had better step up their smear campaigns because they are losing their media support at an ever increasing rate.

  2. Ronald says:

    The liberals had better step up their smear campaigns because they are losing their media support at an ever increasing rate.

    The only thing, Herb, is that Judy is a conservative. She was tight with Chalabi and took the fall for Scooter.

    If you remember Fitzgerald’s press conference from a couple of weeks ago, he said that if the reporters had cooperated with him from the get-go, he would have been standing there in Oct. 2004, meaning that the President’s senior adviser would have been indicted a week prior to the election!

    We should commend Judy for saving Scooter’s azz. If it wasn’t for her we could be talking about a President Kerry right now!!

  3. Ronald says:

    The liberals had better step up their smear campaigns because they are losing their media support at an ever increasing rate.

    The only thing, Herb, is that Judy is a conservative. She was tight with Chalabi and took the fall for Scooter.

    If you remember Fitzgerald’s press conference from a couple of weeks ago, he said that if the reporters had cooperated with him from the get-go, he would have been standing there in Oct. 2004, meaning that the President’s senior adviser would have been indicted a week prior to the election!

    We should commend Judy for saving Scooter’s azz. If it wasn’t for her we could be talking about a President Kerry right now!!
    by Ronald

  4. Jack Ehrlich says:

    Ronald, why is it you have to bend the truth? Judith Miller was only willing to testfy, even after being released from confidentiality, when Fitzgerald agreed to limit scope of his questions to Libby. Why? Do you think Ms Miller is a conservative because she works for the NY Times? One last question. Why is it, do you think, that Fitzgerald did not interview either the liar Wison or his CIA analyst wife Plame? Why would you not talk to those who made the charges?

  5. Ronald says:

    Why is it, do you think, that Fitzgerald did not interview either the liar Wison or his CIA analyst wife Plame?

    Dude, Why would he interview Wilson or Plame? They didnt have anything to do with it?? Plame didnt out herself. She was outed by Novak. Wilson didn’t start talking about it until after her identity was revealed by Novak.

  6. Barry says:

    “Do you think Ms Miller is a conservative because she works for the NY Times? ”

    Of course not. People think that she’s a right-wing whackjob because she repeadtely wrote up the administration’s lies.

  7. Anderson says:

    Hmm, why would we think Judy’s a conservative?

    Adam Clymer, retired political correspondent for the Times, recalls an episode during the 1988 presidential campaign, when Miller was deputy Washington bureau chief.

    Then the political editor based in New York, Clymer was awakened just after midnight one morning by a call from Miller, he says. She was demanding that a story about Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis be pulled from the paper.

    The story was too soft, she complained — and said Lee Atwater, the political strategist for Vice President George H.W. Bush, believed it was soft as well. Clymer said he was stunned to realize that Atwater apparently had either seen the story or been told about it before publication. He and Miller argued, he recalls, and he ultimately hung up on her, twice.

    She’s showing Lee Atwater articles on the opposition before they’re published & getting his approval???

    Judy is a punk. But I’m not turned on.