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The following is ScrappleFace’s posting for November 10, 2005:
Judi Miller Freed from 2nd ‘Correctional Institution’
by Scott Ott
(2005-11-10) — Reporter Judi Miller was released from The New York Times yesterday on her own recognizance after she received assurances from former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby that he approved of her departure.
Ms. Miller, in a letter that appears in today’s edition, called The Times “the second correctional institution from which I’ve been freed in as many months–although I suppose there’s more correction going on in that D.C. jail than at The Times.”
The Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran journalist and free-speech icon recently spent 85 days in a Washington D.C. jail before Mr. Libby told her she could leave that facility.
Despite the isolation from civilization she endured during her 28-year term at the newspaper, she said she had remained in her cubicle as a “matter of principle.”
A spokesman for Mr. Libby said the indicted former top aide to the Vice President wrote a letter to Ms. Miller last week noting, “It’s almost winter now. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will soon look dead as newspapers. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them.”
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His posting for October 15, 2005 on the same subject was:
Probe Narrows: ‘Who Blew Judi Miller’s Cover?’
by Scott Ott
—Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who has devoted two years to investigating who leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Wilson, has reportedly narrowed his probe in the past week to focus on who unmasked a covert blogging operation at The New York Times.
Bloggers, the generally cranky, rumor-mongering pseudo pundits who lack editorial oversight, expressed shock this week to learn that The New York Times itself had secretly employed former reporter Judith Miller as a blogger who operated behind the facade of the Times’ masthead.
As word of the reporter’s secret mission began to trickle from the newsroom, the paper yesterday was forced to ‘out’ itself in a nearly 6,000-word piece that fanned the flame of controversy surrounding Ms. Miller’s covert activities.
According to the article, the formerly-respected journalist had allegedly been doing whatever she wanted at the Times, much to the annoyance of her colleagues, without submitting to the controlling influence of editors.
Editorial oversight, experts say, is the key distinction between journalists and bloggers.
Mr. Fitzgerald will now reportedly seek a warrant to search Ms. Miller’s home and office in an attempt to confirm her blogger status before pursuing the source of the leak.
One unnamed Justice Department official said, “If they find a computer and a pair of pajamas in this same room, Fitzgerald will have all he needs to establish intent to blog.”
The journalist who first revealed Valerie Wilson’s CIA employment, columnist Robert Novak, remains at large.
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