Judith Miller: Biography
Judith Miller worked for 28 years as a senior reporter and investigative journalist for the New York Times. She produced award-winning work and shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting . But she became a figure of controversy following her articles about weapons of mass destruction in the lead up to the Iraq war.
In July 2005 she was held in contempt of court and spent 85 days in prison for refusing to disclose the source of a leak relating to the identity of an undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame.
This case has sparked much debate relating to shield laws for journalists, as well as dividing opinion about Miller. Since her release from prison, and subsequent resignation from her post at The New York Times, Miller states that she has focused on seeking protection for journalists and their sources through campaigning for a Federal shield law .
Her work has included books and journalistic pieces on war and terrorism, al Qaeda, biowarfare and general on the Middle East. She has most notably been criticised for her articles on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction which a number of commentators have argued helped build a case fo the American led war in Iraq.
Education and career
Judith Miller grew up in Los Angeles with a Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother. She graduated from Barnard College in 1969 and then went on to do her Masters at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. While researching a paper for her Masters, Miller travelled to Jerusalem where she formed an interest in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute that was to influence her career.
She began working for The New York Times at the Washington bureau in 1977 after working as a correspondent for The Progressive and National Public Radio. Her new role at the paper saw her covering stories on the Arab world, foreign affairs and the Middle East.
In 1983 she was appointed The Times' Cairo bureau chief. She returned to Washington in 1987-88 and continued her work, becoming a Times’ special correspondent covering the Persian Gulf crisis in 1990.
This reaffirmed Miller’s legitimacy as an authority on military matters, nuclear weaponry and bio warfare which led to her becoming a bestselling author with various books such as Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War. Such publishing ventures in turn consolidated her earlier interest in this area of reportage.
In 1993, she married author and founder of Anchor Books, Jason Epstein.
Miller and Iraq
In the lead up to the 2003 war in Iraq, Miller wrote a number of key New York Times stories that purported to provide evidence, from both ananymous and nammed sources, that Sadam Hussein had stockpiles of various chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. These are now known to be based on flase and or misleading evidence. But as Slate media critic Jack Schaffer writes, although Miller became a virtual evangelist for the WMD story she did so with a sense of journalistic self protection:
To be sure, Miller never asserted that Iraq had an illegal WMD program or a stockpile of banned weapons. Far from it: Every time she writes about WMDs, she always constructs a semantic trapdoor allowing her to pop out the other side and proclaim, It's the sources talking, not me! But thanks to the reporting of the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, we now know Miller was a true believer who grew fat on WMD tips from her sources inside Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress organization, and that once in-country she threw a bit and saddle on the WMD detectives and rode them like Julie Krone from one end of Iraq to the other to investigate those tips.
While reporting as an embedded journalist in Iraq in 2003, Miller actively harranged US military forces and Iraqi officials to follow up leads from her sources in the search for weapons of mass destruction. When no weapons were found Miller later claimed this failure was a result of a disorganised US military.
Key Career Dates
Early 1970s – Judith Miller completed university and became Washington bureau chief of a monthly publication called The Progressive and contributed to National Public Radio.
1977 - Joined The New York Times Washington Bureau, where she covered the securities industry, Congress, politics, and foreign affairs, particularly Middle Eastern affairs.
1983 - Appointed The Times’ Cairo bureau chief to report on the Arab world.
1986 - Became The Times’ Paris correspondent.
1987 – Became the Washington bureau's news editor and deputy bureau chief.
1990 – Miller’s first book titled, One, By One, By One was published. It is an account of how people in six nations have distorted the memory of the Holocaust. During the same year, she co-authored the best-selling Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf.
October 1990 – Named special correspondent to the Persian Gulf crisis, and after that, The Times' Sunday Magazine's special correspondent.
1996 – Wrote a book titled God Has Ninety-Nine Names, which explores the spread of Islamic extremism in ten Middle Eastern countries.
2001 – Co-authored the best-selling book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War.
2002 – Part of a small team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for a January 2001 series on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
May 2004 – In an unprecedent move The Times publishes an apology for errors in its pre-Iraq war intelligence stories. Miller’s byline was on 4 of the 6 articles that The Times nammed as faulty
July - October 2005 – Miller spent 85 days in jail after refusing to reveal sources in the CIA leak case involving Valerie Plame. She went from an outcast, with whom some Times’ colleagues refused to share a byline, to an heroic icon. The Times went from apologising for her work to comparing her to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr in a series of editorials.
9 November 2005 – Resigned from Times, citing among other reasons, difficulties performing her job effectively after having become an integral part of the stories she was sent to cover. However, her retirement may not have been voluntary – her journalism had come under intense criticism with accusations that she had been made into a shill of the Bush administration.
14 November 2005 – Started new job as editor-in-chief of TV Guide and is responsible for guiding its coverage of popular television shows.
Sarah Crawford, Jessica Madden, Alice O’Keefe, Justin Stevens and Karen Tong from the 2006 NACAF Summer contributed to this page.
