I Have Wondered

I have wondered how it is that certain people have been able to sleep at night. Judith Miller was one I wondered about. After reading this article, though I still can't understand her mindset, I can understand her aggressiveness and how the energy of being the mouthpiece of the neocon agenda exacerbated her lack of judgement which allowed her to be manipulated and to manipulate. Dangerous energy indeed.

The Judy Miller problem is complicated. That is, the very qualities that endeared Miller to her editors at the New York Times—her ambition, her aggressiveness, her cultivation of sources by any means necessary, her hunger to be first—were the same ones that allowed her to get the WMD story so wrong.

Miller is a star, a diva. She wrote big stories, won big prizes. Long before her WMD articles ran, Miller had become a newsroom legend—and for reasons that had little to do with the stories that appeared beneath her byline. With her seemingly bottomless ambition—a pair of big feet that would stomp on colleagues in her way and even crunch a few bystanders—she cut a larger-than-life figure that lent itself to Paul Bunyan–esque retellings. Most of these stories aren’t kind. Of course, nobody said journalism was a country club. And her personality was immaterial while she was succeeding, winning a Pulitzer, warning the world about terrorism, bio-weapons, and Iraq’s war machine. But now, who she is, and why she prospered, makes for a revealing cautionary tale about the culture of American journalism.

...Many editors I spoke to consider Miller to be such a high-maintenance, uncollegial writer that they’d rather not deal with her at all. One Times veteran says, “She considers us to be her minions.” The process of editing her sounds like an exercise in misery, requiring a constant subjection to her fits of anger; it draws editors into her interoffice disputes with other reporters. Another adds, “There’s only one editor who has had the skill, energy, and willingness to harness her energy—Stephen Engelberg.” But after Engelberg edited a series on Al Qaeda for which Miller and her unit won a Pulitzer in 2001, he left the paper, leaving Miller without the strong hand capable of directing and containing her zealousness. It was a perilous dynamic: By being so difficult, she became so much more vulnerable to journalistic sins than her more affable colleagues.
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