Iraq reporter defends record

Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller said she understood why Colin Powell, who once made the case for invading Iraq as President Bush’s secretary of state, withheld criticism of Bush in his endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama last Sunday.
‘He did not say, ‘People lied to me,” Miller said. ‘He said, ‘People were wrong.”
Miller praised Powell for saying he received false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction instead of accusing other officials in U.S. intelligence of misleading him. Miller reported of evidence that WMDs were being assembled in Iraq in 2002, a tip which later proved false.
‘In journalism, you’re going to get it wrong,’ she said. ‘The issue is if you do the best you can with the information you have at that time, and then if you’ve committed yourself to going back and looking at it until you get it right, that’s what determines good journalism from bad journalism, because everyone’s going to make mistakes.”
Though a critical question on Iraq put her on the defensive, Miller spoke to an audience of more than 50 attendees Thursday at the Boston University College of Communication primarily about the confidentiality of reporters’ sources and the National Shield Law, a bill that would protect journalists from subpoenas designed to make them reveal information.
In 2005, Miller went to jail for 85 days to protect the source that leaked former Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame’s identity to the press.
‘It’s easier for an investigator to subpoena a reporter than to do the gumshoe work himself,’ she said. ‘Before a subpoena is issued, you have to go through all those steps. This is about establishing a principle. This is not about me.’
A question-and-answer session lead to Miller spend some time defending her past choices, however.
‘You don’t know what my relationship was with my sources,’ she said. ‘What other reporters were more skeptical than I? I was plenty skeptical. I was simply unable to find sources on the other side.
Journalism professor Robert Zelnick said after the talk that he hoped students could learn from Miller about hard work, the process of reporting in complex areas and balancing ‘the importance of protecting sources with other national considerations.’
‘This is one of the fundamental beliefs that journalists have,’ COM Dean Tom Fiedler said in an interview before the speech. ‘In order to get the information, you have to be able to extend a grant of anonymity to protect your source. If we are unable to gather that kind of information and keep the power in check, our democracy suffers.