Posted by: Dale Franks on Wednesday, October 12, 2005 Being on the west coast, I get to see tomorrow's editions of east coast newspapers before I go to bed. (Which reminds me, QandO will have evening posts for you east coasters, because I have had to switch my blogging to a nighttime schedule.) So, I note with interest this Wall Street Journal story for tomorrow (or, for most of you, today) about Judith Miller. Her appearance Wednesday, which lasted about an hour and 15 minutes, won her a judge's order releasing her from the contempt-of-court citation that landed her in jail. The contempt order was still in place until her testimony was complete.Uh...OK. Let's see if I get this straight. Judith Miller, whose story we've been waiting on for months, won't commit to telling her story to her own newspaper? That can't be good. There's been a hushed silence at the New York Times about Ms. Miller's story. None of their columnists are writing about it. Their investigative team of Jonathan Landman, Don Van Natta, Adam Liptak and Janny Scott, who've been looking into the story, have written nothing. The Times' editors have kept quiet. Now, as Jay Rosen speculated earlier today, before this WSJ story came out: What might look like a conscious decision to curtail normal news coverage, or “muzzle” the columnists is nothing of the kind. There are no orders to cease and desist. Nor is there any invitation to examine the Miller case with the tools a great newspaper has available. There is only the suspended state, which includes silence from the top, reporting talent that has been sidelined, and supervisors who are themselves in the dark.There's no conspiracy of silence. At best, it's a conspiracy of fear, where no one has to be told to shut up by editors, because everyone is too afraid to say anything in the first place. The problem for the Times is that no one knows what Ms. Miller knows. And now, for some reason, Ms. Miller, despite now being free to report on the matter after three months...won't commit to doing so. If this is the beginning of a stonewall, the editors and staff of the New York Times will be living in a very real fear of a credibility-shattering episode even worse than the whole Jayson Blair fiasco, and Ms. Miller may be transformed from a 1st Amendment heroine into a hideous embarrassment who has to be driven out of the Times like some kind of poison troll. Because if she's free to talk, and refuses to do so, then the editors at the Times will really have to begin wondering—and working to find out—what she's hiding. And knowing that, whatever it is...they'll have to print it.
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