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The Spirit of Judy Miller is Alive and Well at the NYT, and It Does Great Damage
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Intercept
Posted: July 26th, 2015
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/21/spirit-judy-mi...
Former New York Times reporter Judy Miller ... granted anonymity to government officials and then uncritically laundered their dubious claims. As the papers own editors put it in their 2004 mea culpa about the role they played in selling the [Iraq] war: We have found a number of instances of coverage that ... seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. But 12 years after Miller left, you can pick up that same paper on any given day and ... find reporters doing exactly the same thing. It is worth observing how damaging it continues to be, because, shockingly, all sorts of self-identified journalists both within the paper and outside of it continue to equate unverified assertions from government officials as Proven Truth, even when these officials are too cowardly to attach their names to these claims, as long as papers such as the NYT launder them. Among the assertions mindlessly repeated by the Paper of Record from its beloved anonymous officials is this one: that ISIS learned to use couriers as a result of the Snowden revelations. The claim itself ... is monumentally stupid. Terrorists have known for a very long time that the U.S. government and its allies are trying to intercept their communications, and have long used encryption and other means to prevent that. This is the same process that enabled the New York Times, more than any other media outlet, to sell the Iraq War to the American public, and theyre using exactly the same methods to this day.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in the intelligence community and the manipulation of public perception.