Whatever Judith Miller’s remarkable personal account of her experience in the Valerie Plame leak investigation may have revealed of herself and her journalistic ethics, it provided an all-too-rare insight for readers into how a reporter works.
Leave aside Miller’s ethically dubious agreement to identify Lewis Libby, an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, as “a former [Capitol] Hill staffer.”
Leave aside the credulity-straining assertion that she couldn’t recall the source who gave her the name she recorded as “Valerie Flame,” which just happened to be written in the notebook that contained notes of an interview with Libby.
Leave aside that Miller may have given American journalism its worst black eye since … well, since Jack Kelley at USA Today last year.
Leave aside all the dubious elements and you have an intriguing account of the joust between reporter and source–or was this a minuet?
“On the afternoon of June 23, 2003,” Miller writes, “I arrived at the Old Executive Office Building to interview Mr. Libby. … The first entry in my reporter’s notebook from this interview neatly captured the question foremost in my mind.
“Was the intell slanted?” I wrote, referring to the intelligence assessments of Iraq and underlining the word “slanted.”
When they become a bone of contention in a lawsuit or a confrontation with a prosecutor, the words, “reporter’s notes,” become invested in news accounts with what often seems canonical, reverential status. In fact, notes are just that–notations made to help the memory later on. And not much later. In my experience, most reporters use a spiral-bound notebook that’s about as long as a standard-size stenographer’s pad but only about three-quarters as wide, so that it fits neatly into the palm of an adult hand.
I’ve encountered relatively few reporters who use formal shorthand. Most of us seem to struggle along with verbatim transcription, abbreviating when possible and making up our own personal shorthand systems. This makes for extremely messy notebooks when you happen to be caught up in one of those scrums where the news source is talking fast and there’s no break in the questioning by reporters. I’ve often wondered if I could reconstruct the meaning of some of my notes if called upon to do so a month or two or six after they were written. Most often, the answer is no.
What struck me about Miller’s account was how orderly it seemed and how well she seemed to recall what her notes meant or indicated. That may be the benefit of spending 85 days in jail with nothing to do except reconstruct the events that put you there.
But that’s what makes all the more remarkable Miller’s assertion that she was given the name “Valerie Flame” by a source who probably was not Lewis Libby but whose name she cannot recall.
Anti-Semitic or not?
Manya A. Brachear, who goes from strength to strength as a Tribune religion writer, on Oct. 9 wrote a story about a controversial two-day conference here of Sabeel, a Palestinian Christian group that describes itself as “an ecumenical center for Palestinian Liberation Theology which seeks to make the Gospel contextually relevant.”
The story noted that critics allege that Sabeel “spouts anti-Semitic rhetoric and pushes churches to divest from companies that profit from business related to the occupied territories.” Indeed, such allegations were the fulcrum of the story, which provoked a stream of letters in defense of Sabeel, letters that continued to come in this week.
A typical one came from Rev. Darrel Meyers of Burbank, Calif., who wrote that he had attended the Sabeel conference and heard “nothing that could honestly be constructed as `anti-Semitic.'”
But as Brachear astutely pointed out in her story, the charge of anti-Semitism stems from the image that is at the center of Sabeel’s–and maybe Christianity’s–identity: the identification of Palestinian suffering under Israeli military occupation with Christ’s suffering on the cross.
To Sabeel’s critics, this amounts to resurrecting the “Jews killed Christ” charge that underlies so much anti-Semitism.
At the same time, Brachear pointed out, identification of the suffering oppressed with the suffering Christ is the essence of liberation theology. Quoting Naim Ateek, the Anglican priest who founded Sabeel, Brachear brought the issue to a head.
“I’m not going to strike out the passages about the crucifixion of Jesus,” Ateek said. “Neither will I accept that these are legitimate images for any oppressed people [but not] the Palestinian Christians.”
That’s classy work.
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Don Wycliff is the Tribune’s public editor. He listens to readers’ concerns and questions about the paper’s coverage and writes weekly about current issues in journalism. His e-mail address is dwycliff@tribune.com. The views expressed are his own.
