PressEthic

The public web editor of the New York Times, Byron Calame, has just been given permission to publish in full the memo Keller sent to Times staff, and Judith Miller's response to it.

While these items are themselves of interest, what is especially illuminating is Keller's email to Calame, to which the memos were attached, which is also published online. I do not for a second imagine these will be in tomorrow's printed version, or indeed any other, so this may be viewed of a benefit conferred on online readers, many of whom have doubtless been the most vociferous critics of the recent debacle.

The problems outlined by Calame in his online column were as follows:

(1) First, the tendency by top editors to move cautiously to correct problems about prewar coverage.

(2) Second, the journalistic shortcuts taken by Ms. Miller.

(3) And third, the deferential treatment of Ms. Miller by editors who failed to dig into problems before they became a mess.

Keller makes a number of points in his email to Calame, presumably in response to the latter's column...the key ones to me being:

(1) First, I wish I had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD first thing upon becoming executive editor.

(2) Second, I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own.

(3) (After the initial leak to Robert Novak in 2003, we asked the Washington Bureau to ask our correspondents whether any of them had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper.

So Keller wishes he had dealt with Miller's misleading reporting on weapons in Iraq earlier, and that he had debriefed her about her links with potential leaks in DC, especially given her deceit of the Washington bureau editor of the Times.

Dick Stevenson, one of the White House correspondents is quoted by Keller as suggesting a contract between the newspaper and reporters, whereby the Times would back journalists to the hilt so long as he or she had,

"lived up to his or her end of the bargain, specifically to have conducted him or herself in a way consistent with our legal, ethical and journalistic standards, to have been open and candid with the paper about sources, mistakes, conflicts and the like, and generally to deserve having the reputations of all of us put behind him or her."

This idea, having been publicly floated, may now become a reality.

Keller's quoted email is very illuminating indeed about his attitude to the case, and to his work in general:

My initial instinct to protect a reporter against this kind of intrusion and the pernicious nature of the blanket waivers made me reluctant to back down. (Moreover, I'd grown a little complacent about the danger. Throughout most of this case I never really thought it would come to this. We get subpoenas from time to time, the lawyers fight them, and reporters don't go to jail.)

Whatever you may think of this self-appraisal, it seems nothing if not candid, and the Times should surely receive some respect for facing up to its demons in this case. Even if it hasn't made the front page of the printed copy.