the liberal blogisphere is abuzz about the long-overdue new york times article about the judith miller-valerie plame leak debacle.
others have picked through it in far greater detail than i'm willing to do, but one thing that i really got out of it concerns not the times, but rather arianna huffington. for weeks arianna has been blogging about how, contrary to the newspaper's public and editorial position, the staff was actually quite divided over the miller issue. arianna's claims about the behind-the-scenes dissention was picked up by a lot of other bloggers, but i kept wondering: why i should trust arianna's anonymous sources inside the nytimes any more than miller's anonymous sources within the bush administration?
anyway, my wondering never developed all that much. i never posted about my misgivings. but i was curious whether it was possible that one or two times employees with an agenda couldn't have reported a skewed impression of what was really going on inside the times' building.
but today's article demonstrates that arianna got it right on just about everything. it confirms that miller was indeed a divisive figure in the newsroom and that the staff was really divided over whether the times should have fought such a long expensive and ultimately fruitless legal battle over her contempt charge, just as arianna huffington has been saying for the past few weeks. maybe that's why it came across as dullsville to some, in many ways the article didn't say much more than what arianna has been saying. but one thing the times article did was put to rest my doubt about arianna huffington's credibility. she's the one who got it fucking right, after all.
