Vanity Fair tears into ex-Times reporter Judith Miller
John Byrne
LOS ANGELES -- An explosive article in January's Vanity Fair details the sundry adventures of Judith Miller and the New York Times surrounding the controversial reporter’s decision to be jailed for refusing to identify her source to a grand jury investigating the case of who outed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. The magazine is out on newsstands in Los Angeles.
The story, by Seth Mnookin, splashes the back pages of the magazine, and begins with a full-page photo of a grave, lipsticked Miller on one side and the dark empty doors of the Times' 43rd street offices on the other. The teaser: "Seth Mnookin details Miller's stonewalling of colleagues, the newsroom's belief that it had a loose cannon in its midst, and the growing questions about
Sulzberger's judgment.
"Publisher Arthur Sulzberger barred the reporters from speaking with Russell Lewis, the former president and CEO of the Times Company," Mnookin wrote, "saying, 'Because I don't know what the fuck he's going to tell you.'"
Miller, Mnookin writes, was an ebullient, indefatigable reporter who threaded the borders of acceptable journalistic practice.
"She dated Steve Ratner, one of Sulzberger's best friends... and had even, for a time, shared a vacation home with Sulzberger. She had a reputation for sleeping with her sources (in the 1980s, she both lived with then congressman Les Aspin and quoted him in her dispatches); ... for raining torrents of abuse on clerks, travel agents, and drivers; for cutting down her colleagues."
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Vanity_Fair_tears_into_exTimes_reporter_1207.html