Maureen Dowd Slaps Down Judith Miller

The New York Times policy of charging for online access to its columnists is a blessing and a curse. A blessing because you get to ignore the bland nothings of David Brooks and especially John Tierney. It's a curse because people who don't buy the print edition (or pay extra online) were denied Maureen Dowd's vivisection of reporter Judy Miller. After reading this slapdown of Miller by a top columnist in her own newspaper, it's hard to imagine Miller having the courage to walk into the NYT headquarters ever again.

Dowd rips apart Miller for lying to her editors, mocks the idea that Miller can't remember who first told her about Valerie Plame and for being so cozy with Scooter that she was willing to disguise even his anonymous identification -- against all rules of journalism. When Miller dismisses her legendarily bad coverage of WMDs in Iraq with the banal excuse that "If your sources are wrong, you are wrong," Dowd fires back that "investigative journalism is not stenography."

Finally, Dowd reveals that Miller will write the inevitable book and then wants to get back to reporting about "threats to our country" for the NYT. Dowd writes, "If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hand."

But of course, information can't be bottled up for long on the Internet. Go here to read it in full. (Thanks to reader Ralph Levien for the link.) See NYT, instead of getting more eyeballs to your website (some 12 million a day, by the way), you've forced them to go somewhere else. That's dumb.