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Topic: Miscellaneous items
Date/Time: 10/21/2005 5:12:28 PM
Title: Andersen's upcoming NY mag piece on Judith Miller
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
An excerpt from Kurt Andersen's New York Magazine piece, "IMPERIAL CITY: St. Judy’s Got To Go," which goes online Monday

The symmetry of Plamegate’s simultaneous damage to both lobes of the Establishment has a novelistic irony -- the neoconservative Bush administration and the flagship of old-line liberalism are suffering disproportionately from the same, fundamentally trivial piece of Washington business-as-usual. What’s more, Arthur Sulzberger is sort of the George W. Bush of media. Both are the preppy baby-boom sons of distinguished, understated preppy fathers, Punch and Poppy, from whom they inherited their given names and positions of power. Both are big outdoor-exercise buffs, both are insecure but cocky, both have a bratty streak, both are prone to inappropriate jocularity. And each presides from within an insular management bubble. Bush is also steadfastly loyal; if he won’t fire Donald Rumsfeld or (until they’re indicted) Rove or Libby, it’s a very good bet he’ll stick by his sorry pal Harriet Miers. Sulzberger seems slipperier, yuppier. Until the moment he told Raines to put on his Panama hat and get out, he supported him 100 percent. So even though he treated her to a massage and manicure and martini the night she left jail, we shouldn’t be surprised when his unwavering support of his sorry pal Judy Miller suddenly . . . ends.

This time, however, if he were determined once again to get rid of the most responsible senior executive, it would have to be the guy who hired Raines and encouraged his booyah, hoo-ha, no-brakes style. Whose tacit personal imprimatur Miller has always exploited. Who went way beyond the call of duty in casting a problematic reporter as the embodiment of press freedom. Who let Miller’s highly subjective readings of Libby’s legal scheming drive the legal strategy of the world’s greatest newspaper. But Sulzberger is not going to fire himself. Indeed, he affects a kind of la-di-dah disregard for the whole horrible bungle. If Miller and the Times were going to cut a deal with the prosecutor in the end anyway, why didn’t they do it a year ago and spare their colleagues and the company and government all the agita and expense? “Maybe a deal was possible earlier. If so,” he says, with one excuuuuuse-me shrug trashing his argument that it had been all about defending a crystal-clear principle, “shame on us.”

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