History > 2005 > USA > Journalism

On Opinion Page,

a Lobby's Hand Is Often Unseen

December 23, 2005
The New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 - Susan Finston of the Institute for Policy Innovation, a conservative research group based in Texas, is just the sort of opinion maker coveted by the drug industry.

In an opinion article in The Financial Times on Oct. 25, she called for patent protection in poor countries for drugs and biotechnology products. In an article last month in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal, she called for efforts to block developing nations from violating patents on AIDS medicines and other drugs.

Both articles identified her as a "research associate" at the institute. Neither mentioned that, as recently as August, Ms. Finston was registered as a lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the drug industry's trade group. Nor was there mention of her work this fall in creating the American Bioindustry Alliance, a group underwritten largely by drug companies.

The institute says Ms. Finston's ties to industry should not have prevented her from writing about those issues. Nor is there a conflict, it says, in the work of Merrill Matthews Jr., who writes for major newspapers advocating policies promoted by the insurance industry even though he is a registered lobbyist for a separate group backed by it. "Lobbying is not a four-letter word," said the institute's president, Tom Giovanetti.

But organizations like the institute, which bills itself as an independent, nonprofit research group committed to a "smaller, less intrusive government," are facing new and uncomfortable scrutiny over their links to special interest groups after the disclosure this week that the Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff had paid at least two outside writers for opinion articles promoting the work of his clients.

One writer, Peter Ferrara, an advocate of privatizing Social Security who is often quoted by news organizations, including The New York Times, works for the institute as a senior policy adviser.

The other, Doug Bandow, a scholar for the libertarian Cato Institute and a columnist for the Copley News Service, resigned from both after acknowledging that he had received as much as $2,000 an article from Mr. Abramoff for writing in support of his lobbying clients, including Indian tribe casinos. Mr. Abramoff is now the focus of a federal corruption investigation involving his gifts to members of Congress.

The issue of whether supposedly independent writers and researchers are having their work underwritten - directly or indirectly - by lobbyists and other special interests is hardly new.

But the payments by Mr. Abramoff and a closer review of the work of the Institute for Policy Innovation, a group founded in 1987 by a former House Republican leader, Dick Armey of Texas, are evidence that the ties may be much closer than research organizations, conservative and liberal, would prefer to admit.

The Bush administration acknowledged this year that it had paid outside writers, including Armstrong Williams, the conservative columnist and television commentator, to promote the Education Department policy known as No Child Left Behind.

Executives in the public relations and lobbying industries say that the hiring of outside commentators to promote special interests - typically by writing newspaper opinion articles or in radio and television interviews - does happen, although it is impossible to monitor since the payments do not have to be disclosed and can be disguised as speaking fees and other compensation.

While major newspapers and magazines usually insist that outside writers disclose conflicts of interest, editors do not routinely conduct background checks, especially for authors affiliated with credible research groups.

Brian Groom, an editor at The Financial Times who handles opinion articles for the newspaper, based in London, said he did not recall being told of Ms. Finston's ties to the drug and biotechnology industries before publishing the article.

The editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot, said in an interview that "we're absolutely convinced" the paper was not told of Ms. Finston's industry ties. The paper might still have run the article, he said, but with more information about her background.

David Rickey, chairman of the board of ethics of the Public Relations Society of America, an industry group that includes lobbyists, said the industry opposed the use of outside writers to promote a client's interests unless the financial ties were fully acknowledged. "This is going to sound pretty much mom and apple pie," he said. "But if there is a conflict of interest, it must be disclosed."

In announcing the departure of Mr. Bandow last week, the Cato Institute said it required its writers to disclose all affiliations that might influence their work.

Mr. Giovanetti of the Institute for Policy Innovation said that he, too, insisted that "anyone working with I.P.I. must disclose any pertinent lobbying relationships and conflicts of interest whenever they act on behalf of I.P.I., including published projects."

But he also suggested it was naïve to see a conflict of interest in the articles by Ms. Finston or by Dr. Matthews. There is no accusation that Ms. Finston or Dr. Matthews, unlike Mr. Ferrara, received direct payments from an outside lobbyist like Mr. Abramoff for an opinion article.

Mr. Giovanetti said it was "no surprise that a person can move back and forth between the worlds of lobbying and public policy, just as a person can move back and forth between policy and politics."

In a brief interview, Ms. Finston said that she left the pharmaceutical manufacturers' association in May and that the filings showing her as a lobbyist as recently as mid-August were in error.

She said that she notified the institute this fall that she would be ending her relationship with it to turn her attention to the American Bioindustry Alliance, the new trade group, but that her articles were already in the pipeline for publication. She said she believed that the papers had been told of her industry ties by the institute. "It's clear that there shouldn't be any subterfuge," she said.

Dr. Matthews, who holds a doctorate in philosophy, said in an interview that he was careful to identify his ties to the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, an industry group based in Alexandria, Va., when writing about insurance issues for outside publications.

He noted his affiliation with both the council and the institute in several recent opinion articles, including one published Dec. 5 in USA Today titled, "Medicaid Is Still Welfare." The article recommended that the government allow participants in Medicaid, the federal health program for more than 50 million low-income people, to "move into private insurance." The council's Web site identifies it as an "advocacy organization promoting free-market health insurance reforms."

Dr. Matthews said that while he was identified as a lobbyist in Congressional records, he lived in Texas and "can't think of the last time I was on Capitol Hill talking to a legislator."

Mr. Giovanetti said the institute had a policy of not identifying its individual donors. But he did reveal that it received no money from health insurance companies, lessening a possible conflict of interest in its relationship with Dr. Matthews. Asked if the institute had accepted money from pharmaceutical manufacturers or any drug companies affiliated with Ms. Finston, Mr. Giovanetti would not comment.

On Opinion Page, a Lobby's Hand Is Often Unseen, NYT, 23.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/23/politics/23lobby.html

Bush Account of a Leak's Impact

Has Support

December 20, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 - As an example of the damage caused by unauthorized disclosures to reporters, President Bush said at his news conference on Monday that Osama bin Laden had been tipped by a leak that the United States was tracking his location through his telephone. After this information was published, Mr. Bush said, Mr. bin Laden stopped using the phone.

The president was apparently referring to an article in The Washington Times in August 1998.

Toward the end of a profile of Mr. bin Laden on the day after American cruise missiles struck targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, that newspaper, without identifying a source, reported that "he keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones."

The article drew little attention at the time in the United States. But last year, the Sept. 11 commission declared in its final report: "Al Qaeda's senior leadership had stopped using a particular means of communication almost immediately after a leak to The Washington Times. This made it much more difficult for the National Security Agency to intercept his conversations." There was a footnote to the newspaper article.

Lee H. Hamilton, the vice chairman of the commission, mentioned the consequences of the article in a speech last month. He said: "Leaks, for instance, can be terribly damaging. In the late 90's, it leaked out in The Washington Times that the U.S. was using Osama bin Laden's satellite phone to track his whereabouts. Bin Laden stopped using that phone; we lost his trail."

In their 2002 book, "The Age of Sacred Terror" (Random House), Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, who worked at the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, also mentioned the incident. They wrote, "When bin Laden stopped using the phone and let his aides do the calling, the United States lost its best chance to find him."

More details about the use of satellite phones by Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants were revealed by federal prosecutors in the 2001 trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan of four men charged with conspiring to bomb two American embassies in East Africa in 1998.

Asked at the outset of his news conference about unauthorized disclosures like the one last week that the National Security Agency had conducted surveillance of American citizens, Mr. Bush declared: "Let me give you an example about my concerns about letting the enemy know what may or may not be happening. In the late 1990's, our government was following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone. And the fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak. And guess what happened? Osama bin Laden changed his behavior. He began to change how he communicated."

Toward the end of the news conference, Mr. Bush referred again to this incident to illustrate the damage caused by leaks.

    Bush Account of a Leak's Impact Has Support, NYT, 20.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/politics/20fact.htm

Jack Anderson,

Investigative Journalist

Who Angered the Powerful,

Dies at 83

December 18, 2005
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Jack Anderson, whose investigative column once appeared in more than 1,000 newspapers with 40 million readers, won a Pulitzer Prize and prompted J. Edgar Hoover to call him "lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures," died yesterday. He was 83.

The cause was Parkinson's disease, Mr. Anderson's daughter Laurie Anderson-Bruch told The Associated Press.

Mr. Anderson was a flamboyant bridge between the muckrakers of the early decades of the 20th century and the battalions of investigative reporters unleashed by news organizations after Watergate. He relished being called "the Paul Revere of journalism" for his knack for uncovering major stories first almost as much as he enjoyed being at the top of President Richard M. Nixon's enemies list.

His journalistic reach extended to radio, television and magazines, and his scoops were legion. They included the United States' tilt away from India toward Pakistan during Bangladesh's war for independence, which won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1972.

Another was his linking of the settlement of an antitrust suit against ITT by the Justice Department to a $400,000 pledge to underwrite the 1972 Republican convention. Still another was revealing the Reagan administration's efforts to sell arms illegally to Iran and funnel the proceeds to anti-Communist forces in Central America.

In what was the nation's most widely read, longest-running political column, Mr. Anderson broke stories that included the Central Intelligence Agency's enlisting of the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro, the savings and loan scandal, Senator Thomas J. Dodd's loose ethics, and the mystery surrounding Howard Hughes's death.

He liked to say that he and his staff of eager investigators did daily what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did just once when they dug out the truth of the Watergate scandal.

But his bombastic, self-congratulating style, abbreviated exegeses and a blistering moral outrage fueled both by his Mormon upbringing and unabashed theatrical flair caused some to question his gravity.

When he made a mistake on a big story, it could reverberate mightily. In 1972, he had to apologize to Senator Thomas Eagleton for reporting on the radio about drunken-driving arrests that he could not later authenticate. Mr. Eagleton had to withdraw as the Democratic Party nominee for vice president in the face of disclosures that he had received psychiatric treatment.

Mr. Anderson's decidedly roguish techniques included eavesdropping, spiriting off classified documents, rifling through garbage (Mr. Hoover's, in particular) and sometimes blatant threats - methods he defended as justified in his lifetime campaign to keep government honest. His printing of verbatim transcripts of the secret Watergate grand jury thwarted Mr. Nixon's efforts to stonewall the scandal by hiding behind grand jury secrecy.

Not only was Mr. Anderson on Nixon's notorious list, but G. Gordon Liddy, a Watergate burglar, plotted his murder.

Mr. Anderson marked a departure from traditional Washington columnists like Walter Lippmann who reported on politics as insiders with high-level contacts. His approach also veered sharply from that of Drew Pearson, who began the "Merry-Go-Round" column in 1932.

Mr. Pearson basked in his own celebrity, confiding with the powerful and playing them for large scoops. Mr. Anderson, by contrast, kept his distance from politicians. He would rather go to a movie than a state dinner, which was fortunate because he was never invited to any.

He quietly cultivated dissatisfied and idealistic lower-level government workers, convincing them that the public's right to information trumped their bosses' personal interests. His stock and trade were the secret documents he persuaded sources to leak.

Mr. Anderson's prominence gradually faded, as the sort of investigative journalism he pioneered became more standard fare. As this competition for stories stiffened, Mr. Anderson was also spreading himself thinner and thinner as his television and radio enterprises demanded nearly constant news.

The number of papers subscribing to "Washington Merry-Go-Round" finally dwindled to around 150. In 2002, Slate, the online magazine, noted that nobody had picked up Mr. Anderson's report that Senator John McCain was poised to switch parties. Mickey Kaus, the Slate writer, wrote that this demonstrated "how unseriously Jack Anderson is taken these days."

What many of his readers did not realize was that Mr. Anderson himself added up to a fascinating story. He was a close personal friend of Senator Joseph McCarthy before becoming one of his most fervent and earliest pursuers. He invited Adolph Eichmann's son to live in his home to learn about his upbringing.

When Mr. Hoover sent federal agents to stake out his house, Mr. Anderson sent several of his nine children out to take their picture. For good measure, they let the air out of the agents' tires.

Jackson Northman Anderson was born in Long Beach, Calif., on Oct. 19, 1922. When Jack was 2, his family moved to Utah, the stronghold of the Mormon Church.

At 12, Jack began editing the Boy Scout page of The Deseret News, a church-owned newspaper. He soon progressed to a $7-a-week job with a small local paper, The Murray Eagle, where he rode his bicycle to cover fires and traffic accidents.

At 18, he landed a reporting job at The Salt Lake City Tribune. After briefly attending the University of Utah, he was a Mormon missionary for two years. He then joined the merchant marine.

He soon persuaded The Deseret News to hire him as a foreign correspondent in China. His draft board caught up with him in 1945, and he was inducted into the Army in Chunking. He first served in the Quartermaster Corps and then wrote for Stars and Stripes, where more experienced journalists suggested that he try to get a job with Mr. Pearson.

Mr. Pearson hired Mr. Anderson in 1947. The columnist agreed to pay him $50 a week and give him Sundays off so he could attend church.

Mr. Pearson gave his new hire no byline. Mr. Anderson initially liked the anonymity because it diminished his visibility as he prowled for scandal.

Mr. Anderson wrote that in 1954 he learned Mr. Pearson had promised the column to another employee after his own retirement. In anger, Mr. Anderson got a job as Washington bureau chief of Parade magazine.

The denouement was that Mr. Pearson promised Mr. Anderson he would eventually be his partner as well as inherit the column. In 1965, Mr. Pearson, who died four years later, finally made good on making him a full partner. Pay, however, remained another matter.

"Why, just before he died he was paying me $14,000 or $15,000, and here I was a partner in the biggest column in America," Mr. Anderson said in an interview with The New York Post in 1972.

From the Truman to George W. Bush presidencies, Mr. Anderson gave his own stamp to Washington journalism, beginning with using language he thought a Kansas City milkman would understand.

One employee, Les Whitten, told Washingtonian magazine in 1997 how Mr. Anderson showed scant favoritism toward friends. Mr. Whitten recalled his boss glancing at a draft of a critical column he had written about Senator Wallace Bennett of Utah, a friend of Mr. Anderson's.

"He took one look, sighed, shook his head and said, 'Poor Wally,' " Mr. Whitten said. "And that's the last I heard from him about it."

Mr. Anderson met Olivia Farley in church, and they were married in 1949. She survives him, as do their nine children, The A.P. reported.

Mr. Anderson once suggested in an autobiography that his big family might have saved his life. When Mr. Liddy and others were kicking around ways to kill him, one came up with poisoning the aspirin in his medicine cabinet, according to The Washington Post in 1975.

"I had a wife and nine children, and nobody wanted to risk the chance one of them might get a headache," Mr. Anderson wrote.

Jack Anderson, Investigative Journalist Who Angered the Powerful, Dies at 83, NYT, 18.12.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/national/18anderson.html

La presse américaine

sous la pression de ses actionnaires

30.11.2005 | 14h41 • Mis à jour le 30.11.2005 | 14h41
Article paru dans l'édition du 01.12.2005
Le Monde
Alain Salles
CORRESPONDANCE WASHINGTON

Nouvelle baisse de la diffusion, problèmes de crédibilité, chute des revenus publicitaires, licenciements, révoltes d'actionnaires, cours de Bourse au plus bas, la presse américaine traverse une des périodes les plus difficiles de son existence. La mise en vente du deuxième groupe de journaux du pays, Knight-Ridder, éditeur de 32 quotidiens, dont le Miami Herald et le San Jose Mercury News, illustre ce climat de crise structurelle.

Le groupe Knight-Ridder s'est pourtant illustré ces dernières années par une gestion rigoureuse, marquée par de nombreuses réductions d'effectifs. "Le PDG, Tony Ridder, pensait ainsi se protéger d'une vente", explique le spécialiste de l'industrie de la presse, John Morton. Cela n'a pas suffi au premier actionnaire du groupe, le fonds de pension Private Capital Management, basé en Floride, qui a contraint la direction à la vente du journal, devant la faible performance de son cours de Bourse.

Le 14 novembre, Knight Ridder annonçait donc qu'il avait chargé la banque d'affaires Goldman, Sachs d'étudier "différentes options stratégiques", dont une possible mise en vente.

La vente des journaux est souvent le moyen pour les investisseurs de faire fructifier leur mise. Car, malgré leurs difficultés, les quotidiens américains se valorisent plutôt cher, "de l'ordre de douze à treize fois leur cash-flow", explique M. Morton. Knight-Ridder est ainsi estimé à 6 milliards de dollars, soit le double de son chiffre d'affaires.

Le groupe créé en 1892 sera-t-il vendu d'un seul bloc, à un groupe comme Gannett (premier éditeur de journaux, propriétaire de USA Today) ? Ou à un fonds d'investissements, comme Carlyle ou KKR ? Tony Ridder chercherait en fait un "chevalier blanc" qui lui permette de conserver le groupe fondé par sa famille.

AU DÉTRIMENT DU PAPIER

Aux Etats-Unis, l'ensemble des journaux a vu sa diffusion décliner de 2,6 % au cours du dernier semestre, d'avril à septembre. C'est la plus forte baisse depuis 1996. La chute touche la plupart des grands quotidiens, à l'exception du New York Times, qui gagne 0,5 %. Les deux premiers quotidiens nationaux, USA Today (2,29 millions d'exemplaires) et The Wall Street Journal (2,08 millions) sont en baisse respectivement de 0,6 % et 1,1 %. La chute est de l'ordre de 4 % pour le Los Angeles Times, le New York Daily News ou le Washington Post.

En vingt ans, les journaux américains ont perdu près de dix millions d'acheteurs quotidiens. Il s'agit d'une tendance de fond. "Les journaux n'ont pas réussi à attirer les jeunes. Je ne crois pas que cela changera dans le futur. L'enjeu est pour eux de les attirer sur Internet, ce qui est possible car ils sont des marques connues au niveau local", explique M. Morton. Un récent sondage, réalisé par Nielsen, montre que les sites de quotidiens ont une plus forte croissance que les autres sites (+ 11 % en un an). 22 % des visiteurs lisent le journal uniquement sur Internet.

Comme les lecteurs, de plus en plus d'annonceurs se tournent vers le Web pour faire passer leur publicité. Internet est déjà responsable de la baisse des petites annonces dans les journaux. Du coup, la plupart des groupes de presse se diversifient sur la Toile. Le New York Times a acquis About.com et le Washington Post le magazine Slate. Lancée en septembre, la partie payante du New York Times a attiré 130 000 abonnés en ligne.

Jusque-là, les journaux, en raison de leur solide présence locale, ont résisté à la concurrence audiovisuelle et multimédia et ont continué à attirer les investisseurs grâce à leurs bonnes performances économiques. Mais ils n'ont plus guère la cote aujourd'hui. Ils continuent pourtant à gagner beaucoup d'argent, nettement plus que la plupart des sociétés d'édition et d'information en ligne.

RENTABILITÉ MOYENNE DE 20 %

La rentabilité moyenne des journaux est de 20 %. Mais cela ne suffit pas à Wall Street qui demande toujours plus de croissance. Résultat : les cours des entreprises de presse ont baissé d'environ 20 % depuis le début de l'année.

Pour satisfaire la Bourse, les gestionnaires essaient de réduire leurs coûts, en supprimant des emplois. Selon le magazine professionnel Editor & Publisher, 1 900 emplois ont été supprimés depuis le début de l'année. Le Los Angeles Times vient d'annoncer un plan de départs, après le New York Times, le Chicago Tribune, le Philadelphia Inquirer ou le San Jose Mercury News (deux des principaux titres de Knight Ridder).

M. Morton n'est pas inquiet : "La plupart de ces journaux ont des effectifs au-dessus de la moyenne, ça ne devrait pas avoir d'effets sur leur qualité", dit-il. Dante Chinni, du Comité pour l'excellence dans le journalisme, est plus préoccupé : "Le nombre de journalistes spécialisés baisse et ça diminue, de fait, le nombre de sujets qui sont couverts. Les lecteurs se rendent compte de ce genre de chose."

Alain Salles

--------------

CHIFFRES


1974: année de création du groupe de presse et d'édition Knight Ridder Inc., par la fusion de Knight Newspapers (fondé en 1903) et de Ridder Publications (1892). Depuis 1998, le siège du groupe est installé à San José, en Californie, au coeur de la Silicon Valley.


3 MILLIARDS DE DOLLARS de chiffre d'affaires réalisé en 2004, dont 2,35 milliards de dollars de revenus publicitaires et des petites annonces. Knight Ridder est le deuxième groupe de presse aux Etats-Unis, derrière Gannett (USA Today).



8,5 MILLIONS de lecteurs lisent chaque jour les quotidiens du groupe (11 millions le dimanche), pour une diffusion moyenne payée de 3,5 millions d'exemplaires en semaine. Knight Ridder publie aux Etats-Unis 32 quotidiens dans 29 Etats, une quinzaine de journaux gratuits et plus de 25 périodiques et magazines. Il exploite aussi 36 sites Internet d'information et une régie publicitaire couvrant 110 sites fréquentés par 29 millions d'internautes par mois.

372 297 EXEMPLAIRES du Philadelphia Inquirer, principal titre de Knight Ridder, sont diffusés chaque jour. Les autres grands quotidiens du groupe sont The Miami Herald (316 158 exemplaires) et le San José Mercury News (274 382).

    La presse américaine sous la pression de ses actionnaires, Alain Salles, Le Monde, 30.11.2005,
    Article paru dans l'édition du 01.12.2005,
    http://www.lemonde.fr/web/imprimer_element/0,40-0@2-3236,50-715913,0.html

2nd Time Reporter Asked to Testify in Leak Case

November 28, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 - A second reporter for Time magazine has been asked to testify under oath in the C.I.A. leak case, about conversations she had in 2004 with a lawyer for Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, the magazine reported on Sunday.

The reporter, Viveca Novak, who has written about the leak investigation, has been asked to testify by the special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, about her conversations with Robert D. Luskin, a lawyer for Mr. Rove, the magazine said.

The request for Ms. Novak's testimony is the first tangible sign in weeks that Mr. Fitzgerald has not completed his inquiry into Mr. Rove's actions and may still be considering charges against him. Mr. Rove has long been under scrutiny in the case but has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

So far, Mr. Fitzgerald has brought one indictment, on perjury and obstruction of justice charges, against I. Lewis Libby Jr., the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby resigned after the indictment was announced and has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Mr. Fitzgerald's request for Ms. Novak's testimony follows a disclosure by The Washington Post on Nov. 16 that its best-known reporter, Bob Woodward, had testified under oath to Mr. Fitzgerald about matters that lawyers in the case said were unrelated to Mr. Rove.

In an article and a first-person account by Mr. Woodward, the paper reported that an unidentified administration official told Mr. Woodward about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the case in June 2003, making him the first reporter to learn of the intelligence officer.

Time magazine did not make clear what information the prosecutor hoped to obtain from Ms. Novak, whose name has not previously surfaced in the case. She has contributed to articles in which Mr. Luskin was quoted.

Another Time reporter, Matthew Cooper, testified this summer about a July 2003 conversation he had with Mr. Rove, but only after the magazine waged a lengthy legal battle.

Time disclosed the prosecutor's request in a two-paragraph article published on Sunday, reporting that Ms. Novak had been asked to discuss conversations she had with Mr. Luskin, starting in May 2004, when she was covering the investigation.

The article said Ms. Novak was cooperating with the inquiry. It is not known when she will testify; she has not been asked to appear before the grand jury but will instead give a deposition, said Ty Trippet, a Time spokesman.

On Sunday, Mr. Luskin declined to comment, but he has previously said he expects that Mr. Fitzgerald will decide not to prosecute Mr. Rove. Ms. Novak declined to comment, as did Randall Samborn, a spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald.

The lawyers who discussed the case would do so only if they were not identified by name, citing Mr. Fitzgerald's requests to them not to publicly discuss matters that remain under investigation.

Ms. Novak is not known to have had discussions with Mr. Rove or other White House officials about the C.I.A. officer during the summer of 2003, the time that has been the focus of Mr. Fitzgerald's inquiry.

Nevertheless, the summer and fall of 2004 was a significant time for Mr. Rove, according to lawyers in the case. It was then that Mr. Rove searched for and found an e-mail message he had written that led him to recall the July 2003 conversation with Mr. Cooper, the lawyers said.

Mr. Rove's e-mail message was sent on July 11, 2003, to Stephen J. Hadley, who was then the deputy national security adviser. The message said Mr. Rove had spoken to Mr. Cooper about issues in the leak case.

After its discovery, Mr. Rove provided the message to Mr. Fitzgerald, who had not been aware of it. Mr. Rove testified about the conversation with Mr. Cooper in a grand jury appearance in October 2004.

Even so, Mr. Fitzgerald has investigated Mr. Rove's assertions that he had forgotten the conversation with Mr. Cooper, and why he made no mention of it in his earlier testimony and in meetings with investigators, the lawyers said.

In Ms. Novak's case, the magazine's apparently swift compliance contrasted with the legal battle waged by Time and Mr. Cooper, who for months resisted a subpoena from Mr. Fitzgerald for his testimony.

With his appeals exhausted, Mr. Cooper testified in July that he had spoken with Mr. Rove about Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who traveled to Africa in early 2002 at the C.I.A.'s request to investigate claims of Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium ore. Mr. Wilson later became an ardent critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

After his grand jury appearance, Mr. Cooper wrote that Mr. Rove did not identify Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Wilson, by name, but told him that she worked at the Central Intelligence Agency on issues related to illicit weapons and might have played a role in sending her husband on the Africa trip.

Ms. Novak is not related to the columnist Robert D. Novak, who first disclosed Ms. Wilson's identity in a column on July 14, 2003.

John Files contributed reporting for this article.

    2nd Time Reporter Asked to Testify in Leak Case, NYT, 28.11.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/politics/28leak.html

As Corporate Ad Money Flows Their Way,

Bloggers Risk Their Rebel Reputation

November 26, 2005
The New York Times
By LOUISE STORY

When Anita Campbell started her Web log about small-business trends two years ago, she thought it would simply be a service for her clients and help her consulting business grow.

Instead, she said, the blog "just took off," attracting more readers than she had dreamed of. Then, companies offered to pay her to post advertisements and product mentions on her site. There were enough offers, she said, that she could choose to work with only the ones relevant to her readers. And so, her blog, once just a marketing tool, became a money generator on its own.

"I never try to hide the fact that I am writing about an advertiser," she said in an e-mail statement. "But I also don't apologize for accepting advertising, and I make it clear that just like everyone else I have to earn a living and pay the expenses of keeping the site going."

After beginning as a vehicle for anti-establishment, noncommercial writers, many Web logs have laid out welcome mats for corporate America in the last couple of years. No one tracks how much advertising money is flowing to Web logs. Nor is it clear how many bloggers, like Ms. Campbell, disclose their sponsors. But when writers have not been completely open, their fellow bloggers have been quick to criticize.

Businesses have noticed the growing readership and influence of these Internet postings and are spending $50 million to $100 million this year on blog advertising and marketing, said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, a company that looks at the impact of technology on business and consumers. Recognizing that blogs have become more mainstream, companies are paying for advertisements or mentions on blogs, courting blog writers with public relations efforts and inviting writers to come blog on one of their corporate sites.

The blogosphere, companies said, is an important place to have a presence, and blog writers are not shying away from the attention.

"The attitude has completely changed from where it was two years ago and even a year ago," said Jim Kukral, the publisher of ReveNews, a site about making money from Web logs. "People have started to realize that, hey, this is fun; we've proven it's fun; I enjoy doing it; now let's apply a few advertising techniques and make some money."

There is now an annual Blog Business Summit and several books on how to make money blogging.

Many blog writers have signed up for Google's AdSense program, which started in 2003 and pays Web publishers based on how many times advertisements on their sites receive clicks. Google places the ads on participating Web sites using contextual word matching, in an attempt to ensure that the advertisements relate to the content on the page.

Bloggers are also making money through "affiliate networks," which, in contrast to Google's automated system, allow blog writers to choose which advertisements to put on their pages. They also can be paid based on how often ads on their sites lead to sales rather than how often the ads receive clicks. Shareasale, Commission Junction and LinkShare are three such network companies.

"You have all these self-publishers, people like the bloggers, who suddenly become business partners with Fortune 500 companies," said Heidi S. Messer, the president and chief operating officer of LinkShare, which connects Web writers with companies like Dell, Wal-Mart and Apple Computer.

Sometimes blog writers make money by simply linking to companies' home pages. Companies come up higher in Google, Yahoo and other search engines when they are frequently linked to and mentioned on many sites, including blogs.

USWeb, an online marketing firm, has run campaigns this year that pay people $5 to mention a company or link to its site. Most of the companies USWeb works with do not allow the company to identify them, said Ed Shull, the chief executive of USWeb, but some that he can mention include Lussori.com, a watch and jewelry company; Dot Flowers; and Terra Entertainment.

Currently, USWeb is asking people with personal profile pages on myspaces.com, a social networking site, to include a trailer from Terra Entertainment's coming release of the film "One Perfect Day" on their pages. In exchange, these Web users will have their names listed on the end of the credits on the film's DVD, Mr. Shull said.

USWeb has been criticized by some blog writers for not requiring its network of about 5,000 blog writers to disclose payments. It is currently completing guidelines on how bloggers should disclose that they were paid to mention products, Mr. Shull said.

"We are still leaving this as an option to bloggers," he said in an e-mail statement, "but we do recommend that they disclose to readers that advertisers do support the site through paid mentions."

To be sure, most blog writers do not make any money, and those who do often make only enough to pay their site fees. There are now at least 21.5 million Web logs worldwide, according to Technorati, a company that tracks blog postings. Many blogs remain primarily personal postings that Internet users pursue purely because of their own interests.

Still, large numbers of online writers are interested in making money.

Large blog Web sites like Gawker Media and Weblogs have offered blog writers another opportunity to cash in. These sites display their postings alongside that of many other writers, increasing bloggers' abilities to attract readers and advertisers.

So far, the idea seems to be working. Jason McCabe Calacanis, chief executive of Weblogs, a site acquired by the America Online unit of Time Warner this fall, said the site would generate a few million dollars this year. Weblog's 140 bloggers are paid based on how often they write, he said. A Forrester Research survey found in February that 64 percent of national marketers are interested in advertising on blogs.

Audi, for example, paid for about 70 million ads about its A3 compact model on 286 Web logs in the spring. Many of the blog ads featured links to other blogs that mentioned Audi's campaign for the A3, not to Audi's site, said Brian Clark, chief executive of GMD Studios, an experimental media firm that worked with Audi's advertising agency to create the campaign.

"It was a substantial buy, and it was a really effective buy for the campaign in terms of the response," Mr. Clark said. "You find that blogs are these series of citational records of what bloggers read. People with blogs read blogs. You get a feedback cycle."

Web logs also give advertisers the chance to aim at specific readers. If you want to advertise to New York Mets fans, for example, you can easily find blogs that cater to those readers, Mr. Clark said.

Last spring, Volvo spent several million dollars to sponsor Microsoft's MSN Spaces, a site that offers free Web logs and personal pages. The blog investment was worth it, said Anna Papadopoulos, the interactive media director at Euro RSCG 4D, a division of Havas that is running Volvo's Web log campaign. Since April, about five million pages have been set up by individuals, and a million people have visited Volvo's home page directly from the blog site, she said.

"These are people that we wouldn't have gotten through other marketing efforts," Ms. Papadopoulos said.

SBC Communications, which adopted the AT&T name on Monday, has found that advertisements on the blog site it started last fall, ProjectDU.com, have a higher click-through rate to its home page than its advertisements have had on other Web sites, said Michael Grasso, associate vice president for consumer marketing at AT&T.

Companies are also starting Web logs on their sites written by their employees. General Motors, for example, created two within the last year. Blogs may eventually replace many of the company's news releases, said Michael Wiley, director of new media for General Motors.

General Motors has also started to treat some Web log writers as it does traditional journalists, and is deciding which bloggers to invite to media showings of its new cars.

"It's very similar to media relations, but it's a little more grass roots," Mr. Wiley said. "The level of respect for certain influential bloggers is certainly growing."

When Piaggio USA, the makers of Vespa scooters, decided to include a Web log on its site, the company recruited Vespa customers who were already blogging about scooters. The two Vespa blogs, which started posting last summer, do not pay the writers and ask the writers not to sell later the material they write for Vespa.

One Vespa writer, Neil Barton, said he was willing to blog on Vespa's site free because of the visibility it would give his blogs, formerly published only on his own site, UrbanNerd.com.

"I just thought, well you know, no one really knows about UrbanNerd, but a lot of people know about Vespa, so it will be a cool way to get what I'm writing out there," said Mr. Barton, who lives in New Jersey. "The only limit I could see with Vespa is if I wanted to write about a competitor's scooter. I probably would post it on my blog as opposed to Vespa's."

As Corporate Ad Money Flows Their Way, Bloggers Risk Their Rebel Reputation, NYT, 26.11.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/26/technology/26blog.html

Journalist, Cover Thyself

November 21, 2005
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Here's something you do not see every day: a newspaper reporter interrogating his own boss - on live television yet.

Howard Kurtz, the media writer for The Washington Post, posed tough questions yesterday for nearly eight minutes to Leonard Downie Jr., The Post's executive editor, on a program where Mr. Kurtz is host, CNN's "Reliable Sources." The subject was the revelation last week that Bob Woodward, The Post's investigative reporter, had not disclosed the fact that a senior official in the Bush administration leaked the name of a C.I.A. agent to him more than two years ago.

Mr. Kurtz's program then featured a discussion with three panelists, one of whom assailed Mr. Woodward. (Mr. Kurtz had invited him to be on the program, but Mr. Woodward booked himself instead on CNN's "Larry King Live.")

You've heard of reality television? This might be reality newspaper. It is "The Washington Post Live," and it is playing out on CNN, thanks in part to Mr. Kurtz and his highly unusual double role as media writer for The Post and media referee for the cable network.

In the last few years, with the rise of blogs and a rich supply of scandals at news organizations, including The New York Times, the media have come under intense scrutiny. And many news outlets have turned a critical eye on themselves - a tricky matter rife with conflict that raises the question of whether anyone can report fully and fairly on his or her own employer, particularly for public consumption.

Few have lived in the cross-hairs of these conflicts more visibly than Mr. Kurtz, who has owned the media beat at The Post since 1990 and been host of "Reliable Sources" since 1998.

He draws salaries from two of the most important media companies in the country: CNN, which is owned by Time Warner, and The Post, which is owned by The Washington Post Company. Such arrangements do not violate Post policy. In fact, The Post has quite liberal rules regarding extracurricular work by its reporters and editors.

As Mr. Downie put it in an online chat last week on the newspaper's Web site, "We think there is value in having our best journalism reach as many people as possible through our newspaper, this Web site, television and radio appearances and books."

He may never have imagined that one person might do all those jobs at once. But Mr. Kurtz, 52, does - redefining the term cottage industry and raising questions about potential conflicts of interest.

"It's very odd to look at," said Jack Shafer, media critic for Slate.com. "This is the duck-billed platypus of journalism, an egg-laying mammal with fur - it's just something very bizarre."

Mr. Downie said in an interview that he was comfortable with Mr. Kurtz's dual roles because they were disclosed in a tag line in The Post and on the screen on CNN.

David Bohrman, vice president of CNN and Washington bureau chief, said that Mr. Kurtz was "as tough as anybody" on the network, adding that his dual roles at The Post and CNN served as a useful "check and balance," because if he were "throttled or stifled at one place, he has another platform to get it out."

Mickey Kaus, who is a blogger on Slate.com and a frequent critic of Mr. Kurtz, says that he has been an honest reporter and is equally tough on The Post and CNN, but that his dual positions create an inherent institutional conflict that exists regardless of how fair he may be and how much he discloses his various roles.

"The conflict is that he works for one of the giant corporations that he covers - CNN - and that corporation has made his career," Mr. Kaus said. If he makes CNN mad, he said, it could hurt that career. "Len Downie is in denial about it," Mr. Kaus added.

Mr. Kurtz brushes off charges of conflict of interest and says the proof of his independence is evident in his work.

"The biggest conflict I face," he said, "is writing about The Washington Post, which I do periodically and, I think, rather aggressively. I don't think you can find a media writer in the country who has taken on his own organization as many times and on as many difficult issues as I have. And when I write about CNN, which I have also not hesitated to criticize, we disclose that at the paper."

If Mr. Kurtz is in the lead in the cross-platform era, he is also one of this era's most prolific production machines. His schedule raises the simple human question of how one person (newly remarried with a year-old baby) finds the time and energy to manage them all.

He produces enterprise articles and breaking news for The Post, in addition to his column for the paper every Monday. He answers questions in an hourlong, online chat with Post readers on Mondays. He writes on a blog for The Post every Monday through Friday. On Sunday, he is host of the hourlong "Reliable Sources." He frequently appears as a media expert on CNN and other television channels. He is a guest on radio. He has written four books. And he is now writing a roman à clef about the news business.

"I'm fooling around at the moment with a satiric novel about the news business and having fun, for once, by not having to check my facts," he said in one of a series of interviews last week between his multiple commitments.

There was no clearer display of the cross-currents of Mr. Kurtz's varied interests than yesterday's appearance by Mr. Downie on "Reliable Sources." In a surreal moment, Mr. Kurtz and Mr. Downie discussed whether Mr. Woodward "gets to play by a different set of rules" because he works in The Post's newsroom while also writing books - in the same breath acknowledging that they, too, work in the newsroom and write books.

After being interviewed by Mr. Kurtz, Mr. Downie said that the paper's critic "doesn't cut me any breaks," though he also said that the questions posed on the program were similar to those Mr. Kurtz had asked him at the paper when the news story broke last week.

Mr. Kurtz did come under fire from his colleagues recently, not for bashing The Post, but for what they felt was a breach of trust. In a column last month about the paper's confidential in-house critique system, he quoted the written comments of some colleagues without asking them first if he could use their names.

Mr. Kurtz, while not apologetic, acknowledged that he should have contacted everyone quoted before using their names. "I do think it's only fair to warn people in advance that their comments are going to be used," he said, "and if they had not been showing up on lots of other Web sites, I probably would have treated them with more confidentiality."

Since he began covering the news media at The Post, he has used his bully pulpit at the expense of his employers. In 1992, he questioned whether The Post's seven-part series on former Vice President Dan Quayle (part of it written by Mr. Woodward) had been too soft. Last year, Mr. Kurtz undertook an examination of his paper's coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war. And he pointed to his coverage of Mr. Woodward last week, with uniformly negative reaction from critics, as the latest evidence "that I don't pull punches even when the most famous member of the staff is involved."

"I think it adds to The Post's credibility that I'm given the leeway to report and write on the paper as I see fit," Mr. Kurtz said.

Mr. Downie suggested that Mr. Kurtz might have sometimes crossed the line by letting his own opinions creep into the paper or on CNN, something that violates Post rules for reporters.

"We try to hold him to analysis and not pure personal opinion," Mr. Downie said. "If we think he's slid over the line, we can edit it out, and on TV we can remind him. But it has to be managed, and we manage it by looking over his shoulder."

On Sept. 30, for example, after Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who had spent 85 days in jail, was released, Mr. Kurtz was interviewed on CNN.

"Whether you agree with Judy Miller or not," he said in an assertion many of her detractors would dispute, "she did a courageous thing by going to jail for three months for a principle that she believed in."

But, he added flatly, in an assertion that Ms. Miller would dispute, "She basically could have had this deal three months ago."

Moments later, he showed the lengths to which a media reporter who is also a commentator can go to try to avoid sounding opinionated.

"She is a very controversial figure within journalism," he said of Ms. Miller. "On the other hand, she's won a Pulitzer Prize, and she's clearly a very tenacious reporter. On the other hand, you described her as a hero or a heroine. Not to a lot of people, even in the business, because of her background, as she engenders a lot of animosity. On the other hand, she also has gotten a lot of admiration for taking this difficult stand."

Critics generally agree that Mr. Kurtz has reported aggressively on The Post, and while some say he has been softer on CNN, he has not spared the network when it becomes newsworthy.

He was the first of the mainstream print reporters, for example, to write about Eason Jordan, a former CNN news chief, who was forced to quit after bloggers stirred up a ruckus over comments he made about American soldiers' killing journalists in Iraq.

"I haven't seen a piece in which he's in the tank for CNN," Mr. Shafer said. "But he obviously knows a lot more about the inner workings of CNN than anybody else covering the television news business, and I don't think his coverage reflects that."

Eric Wemple, editor of Washington's City Paper, an alternative weekly, said that Mr. Kurtz's reporting was "fair, fair, fair." If Mr. Kurtz had a bias, Mr. Wemple said, "it's to move on too quickly to the next story."

"What drives him is volume and scoops, not attitude, not edge," Mr. Wemple said. "It's just volume and clips and ubiquity. He is a franchise."

Is he spread too thin?

Mr. Kurtz, a speed talker from Brooklyn who works from 7 a.m. until midnight, with "a few hours" off at dinnertime, said, "I'm pretty careful not to put my name on anything that I don't feel I've had sufficient time to work on."

If being a franchise demands a lot of time, it also gives him enormous influence in regard to fellow reporters.

Eric Alterman, a press critic and columnist for The Nation magazine, wrote in his 2003 book, "What Liberal Media?" that the rest of the news media had shied away from criticizing Mr. Kurtz, "owing to the power of the real estate he controls."

But Mr. Wemple, for one, said that was not the case.

"I don't think people are afraid of him," he said. "I think they are afraid of making a mistake and having Kurtz figure it out."

    Journalist, Cover Thyself, NYT, 21.11.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/21/business/media/21kurtz.html

Woodward rebuked over leak case

Sun Nov 20, 2005 2:48 PM ET
Reuters
By Adam Entous

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Washington Post's ombudsman rebuked journalist Bob Woodward on Sunday for withholding what he knew about the CIA leak probe from his editor and for making public statements that were dismissive of the investigation without disclosing his own involvement.

One of the best-known investigative reporters in the United States, Woodward revealed last week that he testified under oath to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that a senior Bush administration official told him in mid-June 2003 about CIA operative Valerie Plame's position at the agency.

Fitzgerald announced a few days later in court papers that his two-year criminal investigation into who leaked Plame's identity would be going back before a federal grand jury, a sign he may seek new or revised charges.

The name of Woodward's source has yet to be made public and so far more than a dozen senior administration officials have denied any involvement in the leak.

Asked on "Fox News Sunday" if he ever spoke to Woodward about Plame, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "No, of course not." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued a similar denial through a spokesman on Saturday.

In a column highly critical of Woodward's conduct, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell said the newspaper took a "hit to its credibility" and called for more oversight of Woodward's work.

"He has to operate under the rules that govern the rest of the staff -- even if he's rich and famous," Howell wrote of Woodward, one of the two Washington Post reporters famed for coverage of the 1970s Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon.

Howell said Woodward committed a "deeply serious sin" by keeping Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie in the dark about his source for more than two years.

"He also committed another journalistic sin -- commenting on National Public Radio and (CNN's) "Larry King Live" about the Plame investigation without disclosing his early knowledge of Plame's identity," Howell wrote.

In a series of television and radio interviews before publicly disclosing his involvement in the leak case, Woodward described the leak case as laughable and Fitzgerald's behavior as "disgraceful."

One day before Fitzgerald brought charges against Vice President Dick Cheney's long-time chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Woodward said he saw no evidence of criminal intent.

Woodward has apologized to Downie, who said "Bob made a mistake" by not informing him sooner of his source on Plame.

"He made a mistake going on television, giving his opinions about the investigation. ... He shouldn't have been expressing those opinions," Downie added on CNN's "Reliable Sources."

Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, has called for an inquiry by The Washington Post into Woodward's conduct, citing a similar investigation by The New York Times into the conduct of reporter Judith Miller, who resigned from The Times earlier this month.

Miller, who spent 85 days in jail for initially refusing to testify to Fitzgerald about her conversations with Libby, resigned after Times Executive Editor Bill Keller suggested she had misled the paper, a charge Miller denied.

    Woodward rebuked over leak case, R, 20.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-11-20T194828Z_01_SIB471053_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-LEAK.xml

 Rice Says She Wasn't Woodward's Leak Source

NYT        20.11.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/politics/20leak.html

Rice Says She Wasn't Woodward's Leak Source

November 20, 2005
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is not the source who told Bob Woodward of The Washington Post in June 2003 that the wife of the former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV worked at the C.I.A., the State Department spokesman said on Saturday.

Ms. Rice, who was traveling in Asia with President Bush, said that she was not Mr. Woodward's source, the spokesman, Sean McCormack, said. Ms. Rice was responding to an article about the C.I.A. leak case in The New York Times on Saturday saying that she had been one of a handful of officials who had declined to comment on the case.

Earlier in the week, Mr. Woodward disclosed that a confidential source told him in June 2003 that Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency and that he had given sworn testimony on Monday to a grand jury investigating the leak. Afterward, more than a dozen top Bush administration officials directly or indirectly denied telling Mr. Woodward of Ms. Wilson's role.

The special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, last month indicted I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, on perjury and other charges related to the disclosure.

Rice Says She Wasn't Woodward's Leak Source, NYT, 20.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/politics/20leak.html

Rumsfeld says

he was not Woodward's source

Posted 11/20/2005
11:25 AM Updated 11/20/2005 11:29 AM
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Sunday added his name to the list of senior Bush administration officials who say they were not the source who told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that administration critic Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says he never spoke to reporter Bob Woodward about Joseph Wilson or Valerie Plame.
By Linda Spillers, ABC News

Rumsfeld said he never spoke to Woodward about either Wilson or Wilson's wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame. The Pentagon chief did say that, at the direction of President Bush, he did speak to Woodward while the reporter was working on book projects.

Woodward says that in June 2003, a highly placed administration official told him of Plame's CIA connection. Woodward has said the source was someone other than I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff and the only person indicted in a federal investigation of the leak case.

"This is quite amusing," Rumsfeld said. "I was asked to speak with Mr. Woodward about a couple of books he's written, and I declined, and finally I was told by the White House, the president, that he thought I should meet with him. So I did. But I did it on the basis that there would be a transcript and it would be public," Rumsfeld told Fox News Sunday.

"And both of the times that I've met with him, the transcript's there. It's public. You can go read it. And you won't find anything like that in it," Rumsfeld said.

On Saturday, an aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Rice was not Woodward's source. Rice was Bush's national security adviser in June 2003.

Rice's successor, Stephen Hadley, would not say if he were Woodward's source. But Hadley volunteered on Friday that some administration officials say he's not the leaker.

The special prosecutor in the case is continuing his investigation and will present additional evidence to another grand jury, according to court papers filed Friday.

The investigation appeared to have cooled after charges were announced on Oct. 28 against Libby, who has pleaded innocent. But last week Woodward disclosed that he had learned the CIA officer's identity from a top administration official before another journalist had published Plame's name.

The revelations from Woodward, who shared this information under oath with Fitzgerald on Monday, contradict the prosecutor's earlier portrayal of Libby as the first government official to leak Plame's identity to reporters.

A person familiar with the investigation has said that Vice President Dick Cheney was not the unidentified source who told Woodward about Plame's CIA status.

Also, a former Pentagon official has said he never spoke to Woodward about Wilson, his wife or anything related. Douglas Feith, once the undersecretary of defense for policy, has helped shape strategies to stem the spread of weapons technology and devise the U.S. response to terrorism.

    Rumsfeld says he was not Woodward's source, UT, 20.11.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-11-20-rumsfeld-woodward_x.htm

New Disclosure

Could Prolong Inquiry on Leak

November 17, 2005
The New York Times
By TODD S. PURDUM

This article was reported by Todd S. Purdum, David Johnston and Douglas Jehl and written by Mr. Purdum.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 - The disclosure that a current or former Bush administration official told Bob Woodward of The Washington Post more than two years ago that the wife of a prominent administration critic worked for the C.I.A. threatened Wednesday to prolong a politically damaging leak investigation that the White House had hoped would soon be contained.

The revelation left the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, grappling with an unexpected new twist - one that he had not uncovered in an exhaustive inquiry - and gave lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff and the only official charged with a crime, fresh evidence to support his defense.

Mr. Woodward's account of his surprise testimony to Mr. Fitzgerald - reported by The Post in Wednesday's issue and elaborated on in a first-person statement - now makes it apparent that he was the first journalist known to have learned the C.I.A. identity of Valerie Wilson, whose husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, has sharply criticized the administration's rationale for war with Iraq. [Page A22.]

He says that he was told in mid-June 2003 that Ms. Wilson worked as a C.I.A. weapons analyst, by an official who made an offhand reference that did not appear to indicate her identity was classified or secret.

Mr. Woodward said he provided sworn testimony to Mr. Fitzgerald on Monday, only after his original source went to the prosecutor to disclose their two-year-old conversation. But because Mr. Woodward said that source had still not authorized him to disclose his or her name, he set off a frantic new round of guessing about who that source might be and a wave of public denials by spokesmen for possible suspects.

A senior administration official said that neither President Bush himself, nor his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., nor his counselor, Dan Bartlett, was Mr. Woodward's source. So did spokesmen for former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; the former director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet; and his deputy, John E. McLaughlin.

A lawyer for Karl Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff who has acknowledged conversations with reporters about the case and remains under investigation, said Mr. Rove was not Mr. Woodward's source.

Mr. Cheney did not join the parade of denials. A spokeswoman said he would have no comment on a continuing investigation. Several other officials could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Woodward, perhaps the nation's single most famous reporter, never wrote about the case, even after it became the most prominent story in Washington, although he made public statements dismissing its importance. He only informed The Post's executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr., of his knowledge last month, just before Mr. Fitzgerald indicted Mr. Libby on charges that he made false statements about his contacts with reporters and accused him of obstructing the investigation into whether the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity was a crime.

On Wednesday, Mr. Libby's lawyer, Theodore Wells, pronounced Mr. Woodward's revelation a "bombshell" that contradicted Mr. Fitzgerald's assertion that Mr. Libby was the first government official to discuss Ms. Wilson's C.I.A. connection with a journalist, Judith Miller, a former reporter for The New York Times, on June 23, 2003.

The latest revelation left Mr. Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Post who operates with extraordinary latitude to produce best-selling books detailing the inner workings of the highest levels of government, in an unusual - and unusually uncomfortable role.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Woodward said he had apologized to Mr. Downie for not disclosing his own part in such a long-running story long ago and said he had kept a deliberately low profile to protect his sources. "The terms of engagement change when a reporter and reporters are being subpoenaed, agreeing to testify, being forced to testify, being jailed," Mr. Woodward said. "That's the new element in this. And what it did, it caused me to become even more secretive about sources, and to protect them. I couldn't do my job if I couldn't protect them. And to really make sure that I don't become part of this process, but not to be less aggressive in reporting the news."

It was not clear just what had prompted Mr. Woodward's original source to go to Mr. Fitzgerald, or whether that source had previously testified in the case. But Mr. Woodward was said to have begun making inquiries about the case before Mr. Libby's indictment, which may have been the catalyst.

If there are inconsistencies between Mr. Woodward's account and any earlier account by his source, Mr. Fitzgerald could be obliged to explore new legal implications.

The existence of Mr. Woodward's mysterious source came as a surprise to lawyers in the case, because it hinted that Mr. Fitzgerald had failed to learn a significant fact after two years of investigation, despite his reputation as a ferocious investigator who spent weeks digging out the smallest details before seeking indictments.

Randall Samborn, a spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, declined to comment on Mr. Woodward's statement. Mr. Libby was at the federal courthouse here on Wednesday, reviewing documents to aid in his defense. Lawyers involved in the case said that while the issues raised by Mr. Woodward's new account did not go to the heart of the perjury and obstruction charges against Mr. Libby, they could cast doubt on an underlying prosecution theme: that Mr. Libby was untruthful when he told the grand jury Ms. Wilson's C.I.A. identity was common knowledge among reporters.

In fact, only a small group of officials - at the White House, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency - are believed to have known by early June 2003 about Ms. Wilson's ties to the C.I.A. They included Secretary Powell, Mr. Tenet, Mr. McLaughlin, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Libby; Marc Grossman, then the under secretary of state for political affairs; Carl Ford, then the head of the State Department's intelligence bureau; and Richard L. Armitage, then deputy secretary of state.

Mr. Wilson did not publicly identify himself until July 6 as the former ambassador who had made a trip to Niger in 2002 on behalf of the C.I.A. to investigate a claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium there. Both The New York Times, in a May 6 column by Nicholas D. Kristof, and The Washington Post, in a front-page article on June 12 by Walter Pincus, had reported about the trip, but had not identified Mr. Wilson by name.

But former government officials have said that Mr. Pincus's inquiries at the White House, the C.I.A. and other agencies about Mr. Wilson's trip prompted Mr. Libby and other officials within the administration to try to learn more about the origins of the trip.

In his formal statement in The Post, Mr. Woodward said he had mentioned to Mr. Pincus in June 2003 that Ms. Wilson worked at the C.I.A. But Mr. Pincus, who has written that he first heard about Ms. Wilson from a senior administration official in July, said he did not recall that.

"The way he describes it, which is he walked by and said something about Wilson's wife being at C.I.A., I have absolutely no memory of it at all," Mr. Pincus said in a telephone interview. "And I think he may say that my reaction was 'What!' " like I was surprised. He now thinks I may never have heard him, and said, 'What?' "

Mr. Pincus did recall a later conversation with Mr. Woodward, in October 2003, after Mr. Pincus wrote about administration officials' efforts to discredit Mr. Wilson. He said Mr. Woodward stopped by his desk to tell Mr. Pincus that he "wasn't the only one who had been told," about Ms. Wilson's identity before it was publicly revealed in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak on July 14, 2003. Mr. Pincus said Mr. Woodward "asked me to keep him out of my reporting, and I agreed to do it."

Mr. Pincus said he agreed not to pursue the question of whether anyone in the administration might have contacted Mr. Woodward because "he hadn't written a story."

He continued, "I was writing that they had talked to a group of people. I don't think I named everybody."

Mr. Fitzgerald's indictment of Mr. Libby provides some clues about the small number of people who were directly involved in exchanging information about the Wilsons. It says that Mr. Libby first sought information about Ambassador Wilson's trip from Mr. Grossman, on May 29, 2003. It says that Mr. Grossman directed Mr. Ford's intelligence bureau to prepare a report about Mr. Wilson and his trip to Niger, and briefed Mr. Libby about that report as it was being completed, telling him on June 11 or 12, 2003, that Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A. and that State Department personnel were involved in the planning of the trip. Mr. Grossman declined to comment on Wednesday, and Mr. Ford did not reply to a telephone call and an e-mail message.

Mr. Libby also learned from a "a senior officer of the C.I.A." on or about June 12, 2003, that Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A. and was believed to be responsible for sending Mr. Wilson on the trip, the indictment says.

The indictment says that it was Mr. Cheney who specifically first told Mr. Libby, on or about June 12, 2003, that Ms. Wilson worked in the counterproliferation division at the C.I.A., a fact that meant that she worked within the agency's clandestine service, where many employees are undercover. It says that Mr. Libby understood that Mr. Cheney had learned the information "from the C.I.A.," and people who have been officially briefed on the investigation say that notes taken by Mr. Libby at the time say that Mr. Cheney learned it from Mr. Tenet.

Others mentioned in the indictment as having discussed Mr. Wilson's trip with Mr. Libby in June or July 2003 include Eric Edelman, then Mr. Cheney's national security adviser; Catherine Martin, then his director of public affairs; Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary; Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush's political adviser; and David Addington, the counsel to the vice president. Other administration officials known to have been interviewed by investigators include Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser and is now secretary of state; Stephen Hadley, then deputy national security adviser and now the national security adviser; Mr. Card; and Mr. Bartlett.

Mr. Woodward's statement could help Mr. Libby counter one of the main charges against him, that he lied to the grand jury about a conversation with Tim Russert, NBC's Washington bureau chief, in which Mr. Libby asserted that it was Mr. Russert who told him about Ms. Wilson. The lawyers said that they could say he merely misspoke, never intending to mislead the grand jury because he honestly believed he had heard about the C.I.A. officer as the subject of gossip in news media circles.

But some legal experts were skeptical that Mr. Woodward's disclosure would significantly alter the case against Mr. Libby.

"I don't think that in a technical legal sense it matters," said Rodney A. Smolla, dean of the law school at the University of Richmond and a specialist in media law. "It's neutral as to Libby because he has been indicted for perjury and for lying, and nothing in his account seems to sanitize those lies if in fact they turn out to be lies."

Other than Mr. Libby, the only administration official publicly known to have talked with reporters about Ms. Wilson's identity is Mr. Rove.

Other mysteries remain. It is still not known who first told Mr. Novak about Ms. Wilson. In addition, Mr. Pincus has never publicly disclosed the identity of an administration official he says told him on July 12, 2003, that Mr. Wilson's trip was "a boondoggle" by his wife. Mr. Pincus has said he testified about that exchange in 2004 after his source told prosecutors about it; Mr. Novak is also believed to have testified in the case, although he has not said so publicly.

Mr. Woodward wrote that he conducted three interviews related to the investigation, which were mainly background interviews for his 2004 book, "Plan of Attack," about the Iraq war. He said that he had confidentiality agreements with each of these sources, who signed written statements releasing him from his previous pledge of secrecy.

Mr. Woodward said that he testified about a second meeting on June 20, 2003, with a second administration official who was not identified by Mr. Woodward, but whom The Post identified on its Web site Wednesday as Mr. Card. Mr. Woodward wrote that he had a list of questions to the interview that included a line that said "Joe Wilson's wife." A tape of the interview contained no indication that the subject had come up.

A third conversation was conducted by phone with Mr. Libby on June 23, 2003. Mr. Woodward told him that he was sending 18 pages of questions intended for Mr. Cheney, including one that referred to "yellowcake," the uranium ore at the center of Mr. Wilson's fact-finding trip to Africa. "I testified that I have no recollection that Wilson or his wife was discussed, and I have no notes of the conversation."

In the telephone interview, Mr. Woodward said that his goal had been "the protection of a confidential source, and aggressive reporting, and they do go hand in hand."

Richard W. Stevenson, Eric Lichtblau and Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting for this article.

    New Disclosure Could Prolong Inquiry on Leak, NYT, 17.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/17/national/17leak.html

Washington Post's Woodward

Apologizes for Lapse on Leak

November 16, 2005
The New York Times
By MARIA NEWMAN

Bob Woodward, assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, today apologized to his newspaper's executive editor for waiting two years to tell him that a senior Bush administration official had told him about the C.I.A. operative Valerie Wilson.

The Post reported in today's edition that Mr. Woodward testified under oath on Monday about his conversation in mid-June 2003 with a senior administration official about Ms. Wilson and her position at the agency, nearly a month before her identity was disclosed. The disclosure makes Mr. Woodward, who broke the news of the Watergate break-in that helped bring down President Nixon and has written several insider books about Washington, the first known reporter to learn about Ms. Wilson from a top administration official.

Today's Post article also said that Mr. Woodward waited until last month to tell his supervisors about those conversations, even though the investigation into the matter had been consuming official Washington for months.

Mr. Woodward's disclosure adds a new element to - and potentially complicates - a case whose investigative phase appeared to be winding down late last month when a special prosecutor announced the indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby was indicted on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Prosecutors said he misled a grand jury and investigators about his conversations with journalists about Ms. Wilson, who is also known by her maiden name, Valerie Plame.

Mr. Woodward's testimony also adds a new source for Mr. Fitzgerald to consider, and appears to rearrange the known chronology of discussions between reporters and high-level administration officials.

The Post and Mr. Woodward did not identify the senior administration official, citing an agreement under which the official freed Mr. Woodward to testify, but not to discuss their conversations publicly.

In his apology, which appeared in an article on the Post's online edition this afternoon, Mr. Woodward said he told Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor, that he held back the information because he was worried about being subpoenaed by the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

"I apologized because I should have told him about this much sooner," Mr. Woodward said in an interview with Howard Kurtz, a Post media writer. "I explained in detail that I was trying to protect my sources. That's Job No. 1 in a case like this. . . .

"I hunkered down. I'm in the habit of keeping secrets. I didn't want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed."

Mr. Downie, in an interview with Mr. Kurtz, said that Mr. Woodward had "made a mistake."

Despite his concerns about his confidential sources, Mr. Downie said, Mr. Woodward "still should have come forward, which he now admits. We should have had that conversation . . . I'm concerned that people will get a misimpression about Bob's value to the newspaper and our readers because of this one instance in which he should have told us sooner."

On Oct. 27, the night before the indictments were announced, Mr. Woodward, in an appearance on "Larry King Live," said of the leak case: "There is deep mystery here. It only grows with time and people are speculating and there are -- there is so little that people really know.

He also told Larry King that Mr. Downie had called to tell him he had heard rumors that Mr. Woodward would be reporting a big development in the investigation.

"I hear you have a bombshell; would you let me in on it," Mr. Woodward said his supervisor said.

"And I said I'm sorry to disappoint you but I don't," Mr. Woodward said he told him.

In the indictment of Mr. Libby, prosecutors cite a June 23, 2003, conversation Mr. Libby had with Judith Miller of The New York Times, in which Mr. Libby told her that the wife of Joseph Wilson might work at the C.I.A. Mr. Fitzgerald, at the Oct. 28 news conference in which he discussed the indictment, said that "Mr. Libby was the first official known to have told a reporter when he talked to Judith Miller in June of 2003 about Valerie Wilson."

But Mr. Woodward said his conversation with the senior administration official came in mid-June - the exact date was not specified - apparently before Mr. Libby's conversation with Ms. Miller.

Ms. Wilson is the wife of Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who became an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's use of intelligence on Iraq's weapons capability after he was sent to Niger to investigate reports that Iraq had sought to buy uranium there.

In a statement in today's Post that accompanied the news article, Mr. Woodward said he testified to the special prosecutor about confidential interviews he had with three current or former administration officials "that relate to the investigation of the public disclosure of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame."

He said that the first interview was in mid-June, with an official he would not name, who "told me Wilson's wife worked for the C.I.A. on weapons of mass destruction as a WMD analyst."

In the article by Mr. Kurtz, Mr. Woodward said that one of his sources, White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr., allowed him to disclose that he had testified that their June 20, 2003 conversation did not involve Ms. Wilson.

In his statement in today's Post, he said that third interview he testified about was a phone conversation with Mr. Libby, on June 23, 2003. "I testified that I have no recollection that Wilson or his wife was discussed, and I have no notes of the conversation," he said.

As for his first meeting, in mid-June, in which he was told about Ms. Wilson's C.I.A. affiliation, the source for that conversation has not agreed to be identified publicly, he said.

The Post's front page article also said Mr. Woodward spent more than two hours Monday giving a deposition in the case. The article said the prosecutor learned of Mr. Woodward's mid-June interview from the source, on Nov. 3.

In his statement, Mr. Woodward said he told the prosecutor that the administration official had casually talked about Ms. Wilson, and that Mr. Woodward did not believe that the information was sensitive or classified.

The investigation, which has created an air of political crisis at the White House, has placed a spotlight on how administration officials deal with their critics, and also on their relationships with reporters who talk with them on an ongoing basis.

The matter had its origins in a July 6, 2003, Op-Ed article in The New York Times, in which Mr. Wilson asserted that the White House "twisted" the intelligence about Iraq's pursuit of nuclear material.

Not long afterward, a column by Robert D. Novak revealed that Mr. Wilson's wife, "Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction," prompting an investigation into whether government officials disclosed her identity.

Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation into whether anyone had broken a law by disclosing her name to reporters, has drawn in several journalists, including Tim Russert of NBC News, Matt Cooper of Time Magazine and Ms. Miller, who spent 85 days in jail this summer for refusing to reveal her source to the special prosecutor. She has since left The New York Times.

Mr. Woodward's disclosure also calls new attention to his unique relationship with the Post. As an editor, he still writes the occasional news article for the newspaper, but spends much of his time researching books about Washington politics and policy, often granting sources offers of confidentiality and agreements not to use their information immediately.

In the last few months, Mr. Woodward has appeared on several television and radio shows to discuss the ongoing investigation about Ms. Wilson.

In the interview on "Larry King Live" Mr. Woodward had said, "I don't see an underlying crime here."

He said on the same show that he did not believe the conversations between administration officials and reporters about Ms. Wilson were part of "somebody launching a smear campaign."

"I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter, and that somebody learned that Joe Wilson's wife had worked at the CIA and helped him get this job going to Niger to see if there was an Iraq/Niger uranium deal," he said. "There's a lot of innocent actions in all of this."

    Washington Post's Woodward Apologizes for Lapse on Leak, NYT, 16.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/politics/16cnd-woodward.html

Text:

Bob Woodward's Public Statement

November 16, 2005
Filed at 12:19 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

Text of Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward's statement regarding his testimony in the case of the leak of a CIA operative's name, as published by The Washington Post:

On Monday, November 14, I testified under oath in a sworn deposition to Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for more than two hours about small portions of interviews I conducted with three current or former Bush administration officials that relate to the investigation of the public disclosure of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.

The interviews were mostly confidential background interviews for my 2004 book ''Plan of Attack'' about the leadup to the Iraq war, ongoing reporting for The Washington Post and research for a book on Bush's second term to be published in 2006. The testimony was given under an agreement with Fitzgerald that he would only ask about specific matters directly relating to his investigation.

All three persons provided written statements waiving the previous agreements of confidentiality on the issues being investigated by Fitzgerald. Each confirmed those releases verbally this month, and requested that I testify.

Plame is the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been sent by the CIA in February 2002 to Niger to determine if there was any substance to intelligence reports that Niger had made a deal to sell ''yellowcake'' or raw uranium to Iraq. Wilson later emerged as an outspoken critic of the Bush administration.

I was first contacted by Fitzgerald's office on Nov. 3 after one of these officials went to Fitzgerald to discuss an interview with me in mid-June 2003 during which the person told me Wilson's wife worked for the CIA on weapons of mass destruction as a WMD analyst.

I have not been released to disclose the source's name publicly.

Fitzgerald asked for my impression about the context in which Mrs. Wilson was mentioned. I testified that the reference seemed to me to be casual and offhand, and that it did not appear to me to be either classified or sensitive. I testified that according to my understanding an analyst in the CIA is not normally an undercover position.

I testified that after the mid-June 2003 interview, I told Walter Pincus, a reporter at The Post, without naming my source, that I understood Wilson's wife worked at the CIA as a WMD analyst. Pincus does not recall that I passed this information on.

Fitzgerald asked if I had discussed Wilson's wife with any other government officials before Robert Novak's column on July 14, 2003. I testified that I had no recollection of doing so.

He asked if I had possibly planned to ask questions about what I had learned about Wilson's wife with any other government official.

I testified that on June 20, 2003, I interviewed a second administration official for my book ''Plan of Attack'' and that one of the lists of questions I believe I brought to the interview included on a single line the phrase ''Joe Wilson's wife.'' I testified that I have no recollection of asking about her, and that the tape-recorded interview contains no indication that the subject arose.

I also testified that I had a conversation with a third person on June 23, 2003. The person was I. Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby, and we talked on the phone. I told him I was sending to him an 18-page list of questions I wanted to ask Vice President Cheney. On page 5 of that list there was a question about ''yellowcake'' and the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's weapons programs. I testified that I believed I had both the 18-page question list and the question list from the June 20 interview with the phrase ''Joe Wilson's wife'' on my desk during this discussion. I testified that I have no recollection that Wilson or his wife was discussed, and I have no notes of the conversation.

Though neither Wilson nor Wilson's wife's name had surfaced publicly at this point, Pincus had published a story the day before, Sunday, June 22, about the Iraq intelligence before the war. I testified that I had read the story, which referred to the CIA mission by ''a former senior American diplomat to visit Niger.'' Although his name was not used in the story, I knew that referred to Wilson.

I testified that on June 27, 2003, I met with Libby at 5:10 p.m. in his office adjacent to the White House. I took the 18-page list of questions with the Page-5 reference to ''yellowcake'' to this interview and I believe I also had the other question list from June 20, which had the ''Joe Wilson's wife'' reference.

I have four pages of typed notes from this interview, and I testified that there is no reference in them to Wilson or his wife. A portion of the typed notes shows that Libby discussed the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, mentioned ''yellowcake'' and said there was an ''effort by the Iraqis to get it from Africa. It goes back to February '02.'' This was the time of Wilson's trip to Niger.

When asked by Fitzgerald if it was possible I told Libby I knew Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and was involved in his assignment, I testified that it was possible I asked a question about Wilson or his wife, but that I had no recollection of doing so. My notes do not include all the questions I asked, but I testified that if Libby had said anything on the subject, I would have recorded it in my notes.

My testimony was given in a sworn deposition at the law office of Howard Shapiro of the firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr instead of appearing under subpoena before a grand jury.

I testified after consulting with the Post's executive and managing editors, the publisher, and our lawyers. We determined that I could testify based on the specific releases obtained from these three people. I answered all of Fitzgerald's questions during my testimony without breaking promises to sources or infringing on conversations I had on unrelated matters for books or news reporting -- past, present or future.

It was the first time in 35 years as a reporter that I have been asked to provide information to a grand jury.

    Text: Bob Woodward's Public Statement, NYT, 16.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-CIA-Leak-Woodward-Text.html

Journalists Said to Figure in Strategy in Leak Case

November 16, 2005
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 - Lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former White House official indicted on perjury charges, plan to seek testimony from journalists beyond those cited in the indictment and will probably challenge government agreements limiting their grand jury testimony, people involved in the case said Tuesday.

"That's clearly going to be part of the strategy - to get access to all the relevant records and determine what did the media really know," said a lawyer close to the defense who spoke on condition of anonymity.

At Mr. Libby's arraignment this month, his lawyers alluded to using a First Amendment defense in fighting the charges, but they have declined to say what that strategy might entail.

In interviews, lawyers close to the case made clear that the defense team plans to pursue aggressively access to reporters' notes beyond the material cited in the indictment and plans to go to the trial judge, Reggie B. Walton of United States District Court, to compel disclosure as one of their first steps.

Defense lawyers plan to seek notes not only from the three reporters cited in the indictment - Tim Russert of NBC News, Matt Cooper of Time Magazine and Judith Miller, formerly of The New York Times - but also from other journalists who have been tied to the case.

Chief among those is Robert D. Novak, who first disclosed in a column in July 2003 that Valerie Plame worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Ms. Plame, also known as Valerie Wilson, is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who became a vocal critic of the Bush administration's use of intelligence on Iraq's weapons capability after he was sent to Niger to investigate reports that Iraq had sought to buy uranium there.

Mr. Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was indicted last month on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Prosecutors said he misled a grand jury and investigators about his conversations with journalists about Ms. Wilson.

With critical issues of journalistic confidentiality at stake, lawyers and news media analysts said, the issue of Mr. Libby's access to reporters will probably end up before the appellate court, just as the battle over Ms. Miller's confidentiality agreement did earlier this year.

Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail after she initially refused a federal judge's order to disclose her source, who turned out to be Mr. Libby.

The prospect of another legal battle over access to reporters' records "could be worse for the media" than the Miller showdown, said Lucy Dalglish, head of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "You now have a situation where you have a government investigation hung completely on testimony from journalists, with journalists turned into witnesses, and that is a scary notion."

Ms. Dalglish said that unlike the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who was restricted partly by Justice Department regulations on subpoenaing reporters' notes, Mr. Libby's defense team will not be bound by those same rules.

"This is a very unsettling case, and it could take years in the courts to resolve," she said.

Mr. Fitzgerald, in securing the cooperation and testimony of some journalists, agreed to limit the scope of his questioning to conversations with certain sources and topics.

But the defense is likely to challenge the limited nature of those interrogations and seek to explore a range of other topics about the reporters' dealings with White House officials, the substances of their conversations and the offers of confidentiality offered to sources, the people involved in the case said.

Lawyers for Mr. Libby have been meeting in recent days to discuss strategy, but they are not known to have contacted any news media officials to seek access to notes or other material in the case.

Lawyers for both the Justice Department and Mr. Libby have acknowledged that First Amendment issues in the case, combined with the time-consuming process of reviewing classified information related to the charges, could cause delays.

The next hearing is set for February, but lawyers say a trial is unlikely until midyear - just as the Bush administration will be gearing up for midterm Congressional elections.

Lawyers for both Mr. Fitzgerald and the defense team declined to discuss strategies.

While some in Washington have speculated that Mr. Libby might be willing to consider a plea bargain as a way of removing a political cloud from the White House, his recent hiring of a number of top trial lawyers - including Theodore V. Wells Jr. and William Jeffress Jr. - signaled that he planned to go to trial.

    Journalists Said to Figure in Strategy in Leak Case, NYT, 16.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/politics/16libby.html

Judith Miller to leave New York Times

Thu Nov 10, 2005
12:44 AM ET
Reuters
By Anna Driver

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York Times reporter Judith Miller, hailed by her editors as a champion of press freedom but later criticized in the pages of her own newspaper for her prewar reports on Iraq, will leave the paper, The New York Times said on Wednesday.

Lawyers for Miller, who was at the center of the CIA leak controversy, and the paper negotiated a severance package, terms of which were not disclosed. As part of the agreement, the paper will publish a letter from Miller explaining her position, The Times said on its Web site.

Representatives for Miller did not immediately return calls. The Pulitzer-prize winner, who worked at the paper for 28 years, went to jail for 85 days this summer rather than name her source in the CIA leak case.

Miller's source on the CIA leak story was Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, who was charged on October 28 with obstructing justice, perjury and lying. After the indictment Libby resigned and has since pleaded not guilty.

Asked at an event on Wednesday evening why she had resigned, Miller said: "Because I had become part of the story. I had actually become part of the news, and that's something no New York Times reporter wants to do."

"So much has happened since I was let out of jail ... I really thought it was time to move on," she said during a panel discussion at the Media Law Resource Center.

Miller, 57, who covered national security for The Times, came under professional fire for stories she wrote on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that echoed Bush Administration stances and turned out to be based on faulty intelligence.

Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader accused of giving U.S. officials flawed information about Saddam Hussein's weapons program, was a source on prewar Iraq for Miller.

According to The Times' Web site, Miller wrote in her letter, to be published on Thursday, that she had become a "lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war" and wanted to leave the paper because she had "become the news."

HARSH MEDIA CRITICS

Executive Editor Bill Keller was quoted in The Times as saying the paper had been hurt by delays in "coming clean" over lapses in its reporting that supported U.S. allegations of Iraqi weapons programs, much of which was written by Miller.

Others were harsher.

New York Magazine wrote in June 2004 that Miller produced "stunning stories about Saddam Hussein's ambition and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by Chalabi and his allies -- almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate."

The flap over Miller's reportage was another blow to the storied paper's reputation. The Times, which prides itself on being America's paper of record, is still trying to restore credibility lost after former reporter Jayson Blair was found to have fabricated and plagiarized dozens of news stories, which The Times detailed in a nearly 14,000-word article.

That scandal led to the exit of two top editors, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd in 2003.

It also led to the establishment of a public editor to critique Times coverage, and in coming months Miller's reporting of the run-up to the Iraqi war came under fire.

"It's a calamity," Michael Wolff, media critic for Vanity Fair Magazine, told Reuters. "They are going from one calamity to another, like a drunken bunch lurching this way and lurching that way." Wolff characterized the Times as having a "leadership problem of massive proportion."

But on Wednesday, Keller praised Miller.

In a letter to The Times staff, Keller said Miller had "displayed fierce determination and personal courage both in pursuit of the news and in resisting assaults on the freedom of news organizations to report."

    Judith Miller to leave New York Times, R, 10.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=uri:2005-11-10T054434Z_01_SCH976423_RTRUKOC_0_US-MEDIA-MILLER.xml&pageNumber=1&summit=

Times and Reporter Reach

Agreement on Her Departure

November 9, 2005
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

The New York Times and Judith Miller, a veteran reporter for the paper, reached an agreement today that ends her 28-year career at the newspaper and caps more than two weeks of negotiations over the conclusion of a tumultuous episode.

Ms. Miller went to jail this summer rather than reveal a confidential source in the C.I.A. leak case. But her actions surrounding her release from jail 85 days later and persistent questions about her actions roiled long-simmering concerns about her in the newsroom. "We are grateful to Judy for her significant personal sacrifice to defend an important journalistic principle," said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times. "I respect her decision to retire from The Times and wish her well."

In a memo sent the Times staff at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Bill Keller, the executive editor, wrote, "In her 28 years at The Times, Judy participated in some great prize winning journalism."

Ms. Miller could not be reached for comment.

Lawyers for Ms. Miller and the paper negotiated a severance package whose details they would not would not disclose. Under the agreement, Ms. Miller will retire from the newspaper, and The Times will print a letter she wrote to the editor explaining her position. Ms. Miller originally demanded that she be able to write an essay for the paper's Op-Ed page refuting the allegations against her, the lawyers said. The Times refused that demand _ Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page, said, "We don't use the Op-Ed page for back and forth between one part of the paper and another." _ but agreed to let her to write the letter.

In that letter, to be published in Thursday's New York Times under the heading, "Judith Miller's Farewell," Ms. Miller said she was leaving partly because some of her colleagues disagreed with her decision to testify in the case.

"But mainly," she wrote, "I have chosen to resign because over the last few months, I have become the news, something a New York Times reporter never wants to be."

She noted that even before going to jail, she had "become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war." She said she regretted "that I was not permitted to pursue answers" to questions about those intelligence failures.

As part of the settlement, Mr. Keller made public a personal letter that he wrote to Ms. Miller regarding a memo he sent to the staff on Oct. 21. In that memo, he spoke of his regrets in dealing slowly with problems surrounding Ms. Miller.

In his letter to her, Mr. Keller acknowledged that Ms. Miller had been upset with him over his use of the words "entanglement" and "engagement" in reference to her relationship with I. Lewis Libby Jr., her source and the former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney.

"Those words were not intended to suggest an improper relationship," Mr. Keller wrote.

Secondly, he noted that she took issue with his assertion that "Judy seems to have misled" Phil Taubman, the Washington bureau chief, when Mr. Taubman asked her whether she had been on the receiving end of an orchestrated White House campaign.

"I continue to be troubled by that episode," Mr. Keller wrote. "But you are right that Phil himself does not contend that you misled him; and, of course, I was not a participant in the conversation between you and Phil."

Ms. Miller wrote in her letter that she was gratified that Mr. Keller "has finally clarified remarks made by him that were unsupported by fact and personally distressing."

She added, referring to Mr. Keller: "Some of his comments suggested insubordination on my part. I have always written the articles assigned to me, adhered to the paper's sourcing and ethical guidelines and cooperated with editorial decisions, even those with which I disagreed."

She thanked "colleagues who stood by me after I was criticized on these pages."

Ms. Miller, 57, leaves the paper after serving for many years as one of its most distinguished investigative and national security correspondents. She has written four books and in 2002 was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism for reporting, prior to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, about the growing threat of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

But her credibility suffered a severe blow with her subsequent reports suggesting that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, coverage that helped the Bush administration build its case for invading Iraq but that turned out to be wrong.

Ms. Miller was released from jail Sept. 29 after being locked up longer than any reporter in American history for refusing to testify and reveal her sources in the leak case. The case became perhaps the most significant to test press freedoms against government demands for secrecy since the Pentagon Papers three decades ago. And it may foreshadow an increase in subpoenas to force other reporters to testify about their confidential sources.

After asserting that she would never disclose her sources, Ms. Miller revealed that her source was Mr. Libby, who has since been indicted and pleaded not guilty. Then Ms. Miller testified that she could not remember who gave her the name of a covert C.I.A. operative.

In her letter to The Times, Ms. Miller said that she agreed to testify only after Mr. Libby gave her a personal waiver to speak and after the special prosecutor agreed to limit his questioning of her to those germane to the C.I.A. case.

"Though some colleagues disagreed with my decision to testify, for me to have stayed in jail after achieving my conditions would have seemed self-aggrandizing martyrdom or worse, a deliberate effort to obstruct the prosecutor's inquiry into serious crimes," she wrote.

Negotiations were difficult in part because Ms. Miller is a member of the Newspaper Guild and could not be fired easily.

    Times and Reporter Reach Agreement on Her Departure, NYT, 9.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/business/09cnd-judy.html

At 2,000,

Iraq's Military Deaths

Got the Media's Full Attention

October 31, 2005
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

When the death toll of Americans in Iraq reached 1,000 back in September 2004, The Omaha World-Herald ran a respectful article in a single column down the right side of its front page. "A grisly milestone reached in Iraq," read the headline.

Last week, by contrast, when the roster of American dead reached 2,000, The World-Herald displayed that stark number in large type at the center of its front page, above an article and three photographs showing the war's human toll, including a bank of tombstones.

Other papers, too, that had dutifully acknowledged the first 1,000 dead seemed to give greater emotional weight to the loss of the second 1,000. Single columns gave way to feature layouts. Roll calls of names were supplemented with pictures, ages and hometowns. Elaborate graphics and maps charted the who, when, where and how. Writers wrestled with the why.

"Military toll tops 1,000," The Boston Globe's headline reported last time. For the second 1,000, the approach was more personal: "Grieving families find little peace."

Television - where a new survey found that coverage of the war has diminished - also seemed to give fuller expression last week to the 2,000 mark than it had to the 1,000.

How to explain the difference? Highlighting deaths during war can be perceived as a political statement, as Lincoln learned when he was accused of playing on people's emotions with the Gettysburg Address. Were editors last week trying to compensate for having ignored Iraq lately? Was it a reaction to the growing scale of casualties, though the numbers are still small by the standards of other wars? Or was it implicit criticism of the war itself?

"The whole mood of the country has changed," said Ted Koppel, the anchor of ABC's "Nightline." Mr. Koppel drew intense criticism in April 2004 - a year after President Bush declared the end of major combat in Iraq - when he read the names of the 721 men and women killed since the start of the war in March 2003.

The Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the country's largest owners of local television stations, refused to run the program on its ABC affiliates, saying it was antiwar propaganda that would undermine the American effort abroad.

Last week, Sinclair executives, through a representative, declined to comment on the 2,000th death or the widespread coverage it received.

At the 1,000 mark, many still saw the war as having a clear purpose and goal. Now polls show that a majority of Americans think it was wrong to invade Iraq in the first place and do not see a good way out.

The 2,000 mark also came as the war and other problems have left Mr. Bush at the nadir of his popularity. Editors and media specialists said these factors helped make the press a little more sure-footed as it paused last week to examine the war and its human costs.

"The Bush administration is going through a rough patch," said Dee Jack, the news editor at The World-Herald who oversees the front page. "I think things converged to make this journalistically and intellectually a weightier milestone" than the 1,000th death, she added. The World-Herald regularly endorses Republican candidates and endorsed Mr. Bush.

The 1,000th death came on Sept. 7, 2004, days after Mr. Bush was re-nominated at the Republican National Convention and just before the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

At the time, Mr. Bush did not mention the 1,000 mark. Senator John Kerry, his Democratic challenger, made only passing reference to it, issuing a statement noting the "tragic milestone," but not making it his main message of the day.

A majority of Americans still supported the war then, with 53 percent of those polled in a Pew Research Center study saying that the United States made the right decision in invading Iraq, and 39 percent saying it was wrong.

"Media coverage both shapes and reflects public opinion," said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. "The press coverage in the run-up to the war was very pro-war and the country was very pro-war."

Now, 44 percent say the United States made the right decision and 50 percent say it was wrong.

"Bush is in a less sound position than he was 1,000 bodies ago," said Robert Thompson, professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University.

At the 1,000 mark, Mr. Thompson said, the press was somewhat restrained. "A lot of journalists were very worried that if they were critical, they would be accused of something tantamount to treason, as 'Nightline' had been," he said.

That restraint may have been intensified because the 1,000th death came during an election season.

"The news media were walking on eggshells last fall not to appear to be joining the fray," said Ralph J. Begleiter, a journalism professor at the University of Delaware who successfully fought the Pentagon's decision not to release pictures of coffins returning from Iraq to Dover Air Force Base.

Others disagree that self-restraint was at work.

"It is not out of timidity that the press was less critical of the war last year," Mr. Koppel said. "It was, how are you going to prove that what the president and his advisers were saying was inaccurate? I believed there were weapons of mass destruction, and most people I know believed it at the time."

Mr. Bush himself spoke directly of the deaths last week. With the 2,000 number at hand, he spoke to a group of military wives in Washington, telling them that "each loss of life is heartbreaking," though he left no doubt that he would stay the course. "The best way to honor the sacrifice of our fallen troops," he said, "is to complete the mission."

The New York Post put a quotation from the president's speech on its front page, which hailed "2,000 heroes."

James J. Carafano, a military expert and senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization, said that it would have been "dumb" for the White House to have ignored the occasion.

"Not to mark it," he said, "would make it seem they were ashamed of the sacrifice of the 2,000, which would not be the best P.R. stand to take."

Mr. Carafano said he saw the number as meaningless but said it reflected how journalists work. They do not cover policy issues regularly, he said, "and when an event comes along that allows them to illuminate a policy, they jump on it."

At the same time, the Pentagon tried to steer reporters away from making too much of the moment, with a military spokesman in Baghdad warning in advance that 2,000 "is not a milestone."

"It is an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas and ulterior motives," the spokesman, Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, said in an e-mail message to military reporters.

He said that the 2,000th death was just as important as the first. The true milestones of the war, he said, were when Americans volunteered for duty or Iraqis joined the coalition forces. "Celebrate the daily milestones," Colonel Boylan advised.

The media largely ignored his plea, instead offering extensive coverage that may have seemed out of proportion in part because overall coverage of Iraq appears to have diminished. The number of reporters embedded with military units has dwindled, the danger to reporters still in Iraq has escalated and television in particular has been paying less attention to the war.

During the last year, the three major networks devoted only about half the time to combat in Iraq that they did during the previous year and a half, according to Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the Tyndall Report, which monitors network news.

From March 20, 2003, to Sept. 7, 2004, the networks devoted 2,342 minutes to combat coverage on their nightly newscasts, he said. (Combat coverage, which excluded reports on rebuilding and weapons of mass destruction, accounted for 57 percent of all Iraq stories, he said.)

But from Sept. 7, 2004, through Oct. 21, 2005, a few days shy of the 2,000th death, the networks ran 1,215 minutes of combat coverage.

The 1,000 mark came after 18 months of war, while the second came after a shorter stretch of time, 13 months, accounting for some of the difference. But Mr. Tyndall said he believed the early coverage was excessive, in part because the news media - and the country - were "gung-ho for the invasion."

In an odd way, the diminished coverage over the last year may help explain the bolder coverage for the 2,000th death. Analysts said that the media in general seemed to reduce its Iraq coverage in part because the continuing deaths produced a numbing sameness that made them less newsworthy.

A number like 2,000, artificial or not, may have prompted news organizations to revisit a story they had been neglecting.

In addition, the bad news from Iraq "fits the larger story about the administration, that they're in free-fall," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "Things are going badly, and here comes yet another story that fits that larger narrative theme. If Bush's numbers were higher, I do believe that this number wouldn't be seen as having the same potential meaning."

    At 2,000, Iraq's Military Deaths Got the Media's Full Attention, NYT, 31.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/business/31deaths.html

The Capital

Some Tie Libby's Case

to the Case for the War

October 29, 2005
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 - Democrats portrayed Friday's indictment of a senior White House official in the C.I.A. leak case as evidence that the Bush administration was willing to risk national security to protect a flawed rationale for the war in Iraq. Republicans cautioned against a rush to judgment and sought to minimize any damage.

In a flood of stinging statements immediately after the announcement of charges against the aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., leading Democrats quickly moved beyond the details of the indictment to the broader assertion that White House officials had ignored the law in mounting a furtive campaign to blunt criticism of President Bush's case for war.

"This case is bigger than the leak of highly classified information," said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader. "It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president."

In a statement read by his lawyer outside the federal courthouse, Joseph C. Wilson IV, the former ambassador and a central figure in the case along with his wife, Valerie Wilson, said, "When an indictment is delivered at the front door of the White House, the office of the president is defiled."

Democrats in the House and Senate immediately called for congressional oversight hearings into administration handling of classified information, even though Republican officials who control the House and Senate have ignored such demands in the past.

Republicans urged the public to await the outcome of the criminal proceedings and pointed to the fact that the indictment did not charge Mr. Libby or anyone else with intentionally unmasking a C.I.A. agent.

"Mr. Libby is entitled to his day in court to answer the charges against him, receive a full airing of all the facts and is innocent until proven otherwise," said Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee and the manager of Mr. Bush's 2004 campaign.

At the White House and in the offices of senior Republican lawmakers, there was clear relief that the charges did not - at least for now - reach to Karl Rove, the president's deputy chief of staff and a chief political architect for the president and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Staff members, though, did not want to say so on the record for fear of appearing happy on the day Mr. Libby was indicted.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and a senior member of the judiciary and intelligence committees, acknowledged that the five counts against Mr. Libby were serious. But he said he believed the whole investigation was misguided because Ms. Wilson, whose role at the C.I.A. Mr. Libby is accused of disclosing, was not a covert agent as defined in the federal law that prompted the inquiry by the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

"If the whole covert agent thing is blown away because it never really applied to begin with, why are we going through all this?" Mr. Hatch asked.

A similar point was made by Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia and a member of the House Republican leadership who was traveling Friday with Vice President Dick Cheney.

"It's significant that the indictment does not mention the outing of Valerie Plame," Mr. Kingston said in a statement, using Ms. Wilson's maiden name. "It appears that after two years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald does not agree with the administration's critics that her situation is what this is all about."

Mr. Hatch and Mr. Kingston, though, were among a minority in their party to weigh in aggressively. Many Republicans were quiet, apparently preferring, at least initially, to stay out of the matter.

One Republican said the party would be judged on how decisively it responds to these accusations of wrongdoing and others in which leading Republicans are entangled. "What is our standard?" said Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut. "The bottom line is how we handle it."

But Democrats castigated the administration. Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who lost the 2004 presidential race to Mr. Bush, said, "Today's indictment of the vice president's top aide and the continuing investigation of Karl Rove are evidence of White House corruption at the very highest levels, far from the 'honor and dignity' the president pledged to restore to Washington just five years ago."

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, said the "heart of these indictments was the effort by the Bush administration to discredit critics of its Iraq policy with reckless disregard for national security and the public trust."

Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the senior Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, immediately renewed his call for oversight hearings in a letter to Representative Thomas M. Davis III, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the panel. Mr. Waxman pointed to the part of the indictment suggesting that Mr. Cheney told Mr. Libby of Ms. Wilson's work at the C.I.A.

"Obviously, the involvement of the vice president raises profoundly disturbing questions," Mr. Waxman wrote. "We need to understand in detail what role Mr. Cheney played in this despicable incident."

Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, also said additional inquiry was necessary. "The fact is that at any time the Senate Intelligence Committee pursued a line of questioning that brought us close to the White House, our efforts were thwarted," Mr. Rockefeller said.

    Some Tie Libby's Case to the Case for the War, NYT, 29.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/29/politics/29react.html?hp&ex=1130644800&en=b00dc9b5fc11ca35&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The News Media

Novel Strategy Pits

Journalists Against Source

October 29, 2005
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
and ADAM LIPTAK

In pressing his indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., the special prosecutor is pitting three prominent journalists against their former source, a strategy that experts in law and journalism say has rarely been used or tested.

It is all but unheard of for reporters to turn publicly on their sources or for prosecutors to succeed in conscripting members of a profession that prizes its independence.

Yet Mr. Libby's trial on perjury and obstruction charges will largely turn on whether jurors are more inclined to believe a government official who played a critical role in devising the justifications for the Iraq war or members of a profession whose own credibility has been under assault.

"We don't have much of a track record," said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency, "because journalists so rarely testify."

The three reporters all initially resisted subpoenas for their testimony, hoping to avoid not only testifying before the grand jury but also having to appear as a prosecution witness at trial. Such challenges have often been successful in the past. But all of them lost, and ultimately relented, saying that Mr. Libby had granted them permission to testify about confidential conversations.

"This is exactly the thing," said Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, "that journalists fear most - that they will become an investigative arm of the government and be forced to testify against the sources they've cultivated." While the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, is all but certain to call at least some of the reporters as witnesses, whether they will be judged credible is an open question.

Relying on the journalists - Tim Russert of NBC News, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of The New York Times - will present Mr. Fitzgerald with challenges, said William E. Lawler III, a former federal prosecutor in Washington.

"Tim Russert, for instance, on the one hand is someone used to communicating well, is recognizable and is probably well liked," Mr. Lawler said. "On the other hand, the media is not universally beloved these days."

Mr. Russert addressed the case briefly on NBC yesterday.

"Clearly the special counsel has made a judgment," Mr. Russert said, "that when taking the comments and statements of Matt Cooper and Judy Miller and myself as opposed to Scooter Libby, he has decided that Mr. Libby was not telling the truth."

Richard A. Sauber, a lawyer for Mr. Cooper, said that the trial would not turn on personalities involved. "Atmospherics can make a difference when the case is on the margin," he said. "I don't know that this is really that kind of case."

Mr. Fitzgerald has gathered documents and other evidence showing that Mr. Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, learned of the identity of a C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, weeks before he talked with the three reporters. But, according to the indictment, Mr. Libby told the grand jury that the information came from Mr. Russert.

The reporters fought subpoenas, arguing among other things that they should not be converted into an investigative arm of the government. All eventually testified, relying, they said, on Mr. Libby's permission.

Mr. Russert's testimony, in August 2004, was particularly noteworthy. As part of a deal with Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Russert testified only to his end of a July 2003 conversation with Mr. Libby. According to a statement issued by NBC News at the time, Mr. Russert said he did not provide information about Ms. Wilson to Mr. Libby. Indeed, this statement said, Mr. Russert said that he had first learned of Ms. Wilson's identity on July 14, 2003, when it was disclosed by Robert D. Novak in his column.

Only with yesterday's indictment, however, did it become clear just how crucial reporters will be to proving the case, Professor Kirtley said.

"They were used to get the indictment," she said of the reporters, "and will be a central part of how the prosecution proceeds."

Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer, said he could not recall a previous case that depended so heavily on testimony by reporters or in which reporters could be so exposed.

"It's troubling that reporters are being asked to play so central a role, but even more troubling that reporters may be obliged to play the role of testifying against someone that they had promised confidentiality to," said Mr. Abrams, who has at various times represented The New York Times, Time, Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper.

Mr. Fitzgerald said at a news conference yesterday that he had not been seeking a "First Amendment showdown" with the news media and had thought "long and hard" before issuing subpoenas to reporters.

But in the end, he said, he had to, because not to do so would have left major issues unresolved.

"I do not think that a reporter should be subpoenaed anything close to routinely," he said. "It should be an extraordinary case. But if you're dealing with a crime - and what's different here is the transaction is between a person and a reporter, they're the eyewitness to the crime - if you walk away from that and don't talk to the eyewitness, you are doing a reckless job of either charging someone with a crime that may not turn out to have been committed. And that frightens me, because there are things that you can learn from a reporter that would show you the crime wasn't committed."

He also suggested that the indictment might have been brought a year ago had Ms. Miller agreed to testify when she was subpoenaed in August 2004. Instead, Ms. Miller fought the case, appealing it all the way to the United States Supreme Court. After it declined to hear the case, she spent 85 days in jail, to protect what she said was her obligation to a confidential source.

Ms. Miller, however, plays a relatively small part in the indictment. All three reporters are discussed in the obstruction of justice count against Mr. Libby. But Mr. Russert and Mr. Cooper are the main witnesses in one count each against Mr. Libby of making false statements to investigators and perjury before the grand jury.

Ms. Miller said she did not know why Mr. Fitzgerald "structured it as he did." Mr. Libby's eventual trial, she said, would bring into focus the balance the courts struck in her case.

"The case has got to raise a profound question about reporters' obligations and freedom of the press against national security imperatives," Ms. Miller said.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the case was setting a dangerous precedent. "Reading the indictment makes my blood run cold," she said. "This whole thing hinges on Russert."

Basing criminal charges on statements by reporters, she said, "puts us on completely new ground."

    Novel Strategy Pits Journalists Against Source, NYT, 29.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/29/politics/29media.html

The TV Watch

A Prosecutor's Arresting Performance

October 29, 2005
The New York Times
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

In a dizzying kaleidoscope of split-screens and news crawls, one figure stood out on all the major networks yesterday - the special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, breaking his silence at long last.

And for that hour of live television, his blunt, staccato voice was the only one being heard. At one point in Mr. Fitzgerald's news conference, CNN split the screen to include live tape of a speech by Vice President Dick Cheney, whom the special prosecutor had just named as one of the government officials who told I. Lewis Libby Jr. about Valerie Wilson's day job.

Mr. Cheney stood at a lectern in Georgia surrounded by applauding troops in camouflage, smiling his crooked grin and talking soundlessly: news programs kept the vice president's sound off and the microphones glued to Mr. Fitzgerald.

The special prosecutor gave an arresting performance - and not just because he laid out why the grand jury had indicted Mr. Cheney's chief of staff on five criminal counts.

In any turmoil, television seeks a hero. Stepping above the political wrangling, Mr. Fitzgerald presented himself to viewers as a righteous, homespun voice of reason, using baseball metaphors to explain his investigation and the flag to defend it.

"But I think what we see here today, when a vice president's chief of staff is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice," Mr. Fitzgerald said, "it does show the world that this is a country that takes its law seriously; that all citizens are bound by the law."

Back in the United States attorney's office in Chicago, the relentless prosecutor is known as Eliot Ness with a Harvard degree. Standing at a lectern at the Justice Department, wearing a blue shirt and red tie, a film of sweat on his forehead, Mr. Fitzgerald looked more like a Jimmy Stewart character: Mr. Fitzgerald goes to Washington. And he knew it. When asked if he learned anything surprising about the ways of the capital during his long stay, Mr. Fitzgerald grinned and said yes.

He never seemed to forget the cameras, apologizing to viewers for not being able to say more about an investigation that has lasted two years. "I know that people want to know whatever it is that we know, and they're probably sitting at home with the TV thinking, I want to jump through the TV, grab him by his collar and tell him to tell us everything they figured out over the last two years," he replied when asked why the indictment did not identify Official A, who told the columnist Robert D. Novak about the wife of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. "We just can't do that. It's not because we enjoy holding back information from you; that's the law."

It was a complicated case, but Mr. Fitzgerald kept it simple, contrasting all the more with the mixed messages popping up on the screen beside him. Mr. Fitzgerald had painted a poignant picture of the wrongfully exposed C.I.A. officer, noting, "The fact that she was a C.I.A. officer was not well known, for her protection or for the benefit of all us."

But CNN and other cable news networks flashed a Vanity Fair spread of Mrs. Wilson in sunglasses and a chic headscarf posing in a convertible beside her elegant husband - looking more like a spy out for a spin than in from the cold.

Mr. Libby's face was flashed across the screen in tabloid before and after shots: first smiling confidently during a Congressional hearing, then more recently, limping to work on crutches - a parable of a hobbled Bush administration.

Mr. Fitzgerald is often described as a detail-oriented, obsessive prosecutor, someone who knows every facet of a case and sticks to hard facts. But after months of secrecy, he showed that he could adroitly talk his way around the political shoals.

When asked about complaints that he was partisan, Mr. Fitzgerald smiled. "I don't know - you know, it's sort of, When'd you stop beating your wife? " he replied. "One day I read that I was a Republican hack, another day I read that I was a Democratic hack, and the only thing I did between those two nights was sleep."

    A Prosecutor's Arresting Performance, NYT, 29.10.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/29/politics/29watch.html

 Woman of Mass Destruction

Saturday 22 October 2005
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

[ Cet article a été copié sur Truthout http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102205A.shtml ,

et non sur le site du NYT.

Original : 

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html

URI=http://select.nytimes.com/2005/10/22/opinion/22dowd.html ]

I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.

The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy - her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur - never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types.

Once when I was covering the first Bush White House, I was in The Times' seat in the crowded White House press room, listening to an administration official's background briefing. Judy had moved on from her tempestuous tenure as a Washington editor to be a reporter based in New York, but she showed up at this national security affairs briefing.

At first she leaned against the wall near where I was sitting, but I noticed that she seemed agitated about something. Midway through the briefing, she came over and whispered to me, "I think I should be sitting in the Times seat."

It was such an outrageous move, I could only laugh. I got up and stood in the back of the room, while Judy claimed what she felt was her rightful power perch.

She never knew when to quit. That was her talent and her flaw. Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, she was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers. She more than earned her sobriquet "Miss Run Amok."

Judy's stories about WMD fit too perfectly with the White House's case for war. She was close to Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who was conning the neocons to knock out Saddam so he could get his hands on Iraq, and I worried that she was playing a leading role in the dangerous echo chamber that former Senator Bob Graham dubbed "incestuous amplification." Using Iraqi defectors and exiles, Mr. Chalabi planted bogus stories with Judy and other credulous journalists.

Even last April, when I wrote a column critical of Mr. Chalabi, she fired off e-mail to me defending him.

When Bill Keller became executive editor in the summer of 2003, he barred Judy from covering Iraq and W.M.D issues. But he admitted in The Times' Sunday story about Judy's role in the Plame leak case that she had kept "drifting" back. Why did nobody stop this drift?

Judy admitted in the story that she "got it totally wrong" about WMD "If your sources are wrong," she said, "you are wrong." But investigative reporting is not stenography.

The Times' story and Judy's own first-person account had the unfortunate effect of raising more questions. As Bill said in an e-mail note to the staff on Friday, Judy seemed to have "misled" the Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, about the extent of her involvement in the Valerie Plame leak case.

She casually revealed that she had agreed to identify her source, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, as a "former Hill staffer" because he had once worked on Capitol Hill. The implication was that this bit of deception was a common practice for reporters. It isn't.

She said that she had wanted to write about the Wilson-Plame matter, but that her editor would not allow it. But Managing Editor Jill Abramson, then the Washington bureau chief, denied this, saying that Judy had never broached the subject with her.

It also doesn't seem credible that Judy wouldn't remember a Marvel comics name like "Valerie Flame." Nor does it seem credible that she doesn't know how the name got into her notebook and that, as she wrote, she "did not believe the name came from Mr. Libby."

An Associated Press story yesterday reported that Judy had coughed up the details of an earlier meeting with Mr. Libby only after prosecutors confronted her with a visitor log showing that she had met with him on June 23, 2003. This cagey confusion is what makes people wonder whether her stint in the Alexandria jail was in part a career rehabilitation project.

Judy is refusing to answer a lot of questions put to her by Times reporters, or show the notes that she shared with the grand jury. I admire Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller for aggressively backing reporters in the cross hairs of a prosecutor. But before turning Judy's case into a First Amendment battle, they should have nailed her to a chair and extracted the entire story of her escapade.

Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country." If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

     Woman of Mass Destruction, By MAUREEN DOWD, NYT,
    Published: October 22, 2005, Source secondaire : http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102205A.shtml

Times:

Miller May Have Misled Editors

By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer
Saturday, October 22, 2005
(10-22) 06:35 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP)

Judith Miller's boss says the New York Times reporter appears to have misled the newspaper about her role in the CIA leak controversy.

In an e-mail memo Friday to the newspaper's staff, Executive Editor Bill Keller said that until Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald subpoenaed Miller in the criminal probe, "I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end" of leaks aimed at Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson.

"Judy seems to have misled" Times Washington bureau chief Bill Taubman about the extent of her involvement, Keller wrote.

Taubman asked Miller in the fall of 2003 whether she was among the reporters who had gotten leaks about the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

"Ms. Miller denied it," the newspaper reported in a weekend story.

Miller and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, discussed Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, in three conversations in the weeks before the CIA officer's status was outed by columnist Robert Novak.

Keller said he might have been more willing to compromise with Fitzgerald over Miller's testimony "if I had known the details of Judy's entanglement with Libby."

In response, Miller told the Times that Keller's memo was "seriously inaccurate," the newspaper said in a story for Saturday editions. It reported that in a memo to Keller, Miller wrote she "never meant to mislead Phil (Taubman), nor did I mislead him."

As for Keller's remark about "my `entanglement' with Mr. Libby, I had no personal, social, or other relationship with him except as a source," Miller wrote.

Miller's attorney, Bob Bennett, told The Washington Post that it was "absolutely false" to suggest she withheld information about a June 2003 meeting with Libby, saying the conversation hadn't seemed like "a big deal at the time."

Responding to Keller's memo, Bennett said: "I am very concerned now that there are people trying to even old scores and undercut her as a heroic journalist."

Bennett did not return calls by The Associated Press seeking comment.

The criticism of the reporter came amid a sign that the prosecutor may be preparing indictments. Fitzgerald's office set up a Web site containing the record of the broad investigative mandate handed to him by the Justice Department at the outset of his investigation two years ago.

Unlike some of his predecessors who operated under a law that has since expired, Fitzgerald does not need to write a final report, so he would not need a Web site for that purpose.

The criticism of Miller emerged amid new details about how she belatedly turned over notes of a June 23, 2003, conversation she had with Libby.

In her first grand jury appearance Sept. 30 after being freed from prison for refusing to testify, Miller did not mention the meeting.

She retrieved her notes about it only when prosecutors showed her White House visitor logs showing she had met with Libby in the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, said two lawyers, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing secrecy of the grand jury probe.

One lawyer familiar with Miller's testimony said the reporter told prosecutors at first that she did not believe the June meeting would have involved Plame because she had just returned from covering the Iraq war. She said she was probably giving Libby an update of her experiences there, the lawyer said.

However, in reviewing her notes, Miller discovered they indicated that Libby had given her information about Plame at that meeting. Fitzgerald then arranged for her to return to the grand jury to testify about it, the lawyers said.

The evidence of that meeting has become important to the investigation because it indicates that Libby was passing information to reporters about Plame well before her husband went public with accusations that the Bush administration had twisted pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

Libby and Bush political adviser Karl Rove have emerged as central figures in the probe because both had contacts with reporter who ultimately disclosed Plame's identity in news stories.

Conflicts between presidential aides' testimony and other evidence could result in criminal charges. The grand jury investigating the matter for the last two years is set to expire next Friday.

___


On the Web:

www.usdoj.gov/usao/iln/osc/index.html

    Times: Miller May Have Misled Editors, SFgate > AP, 22.10.2005,
    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/10/22/national/w003819D48.DTL

The Miller Case:

A Notebook, a Cause,

a Jail Cell and a Deal

October 16, 2005
The New York Times
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.,
ADAM LIPTAK and CLIFFORD J. LEVY

In a notebook belonging to Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, amid notations about Iraq and nuclear weapons, appear two small words: "Valerie Flame."

Ms. Miller should have written Valerie Plame. That name is at the core of a federal grand jury investigation that has reached deep into the White House. At issue is whether Bush administration officials leaked the identity of Ms. Plame, an undercover C.I.A. operative, to reporters as part of an effort to blunt criticism of the president's justification for the war in Iraq.

Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify and reveal her confidential source, then relented. On Sept. 30, she told the grand jury that her source was I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff. But she said he did not reveal Ms. Plame's name.

And when the prosecutor in the case asked her to explain how "Valerie Flame" appeared in the same notebook she used in interviewing Mr. Libby, Ms. Miller said she "didn't think" she heard it from him. "I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall," she wrote on Friday, recounting her testimony for an article that appears today.

Whether Ms. Miller's testimony will prove valuable to the prosecution remains unclear, as do its ramifications for press freedom. Yet an examination of Ms. Miller's decision not to testify, and then to do so, offers fresh information about her role in the investigation and how The New York Times turned her case into a cause.

The grand jury investigation centers on whether administration officials leaked the identity of Ms. Plame, whose husband, a former diplomat named Joseph C. Wilson IV, became a public critic of the Iraq war in July 2003. But Ms. Miller said Mr. Libby first raised questions about the diplomat in an interview with her that June, an account suggesting that Mr. Wilson was on the White House's radar before he went public with his criticisms.

Once Ms. Miller was issued a subpoena in August 2004 to testify about her conversations with Mr. Libby, she and The Times vowed to fight it. Behind the scenes, however, her lawyer made inquiries to see if Mr. Libby would release her from their confidentiality agreement. Ms. Miller said she decided not to testify in part because she thought that Mr. Libby's lawyer might be signaling to keep her quiet unless she would exonerate his client. The lawyer denies that, and Mr. Libby did not respond to requests for an interview.

As Ms. Miller, 57, remained resolute and moved closer to going to jail for her silence, the leadership of The Times stood squarely behind her.

"She'd given her pledge of confidentiality," said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher. "She was prepared to honor that. We were going to support her."

But Mr. Sulzberger and the paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, knew few details about Ms. Miller's conversations with her confidential source other than his name. They did not review Ms. Miller's notes. Mr. Keller said he learned about the "Valerie Flame" notation only this month. Mr. Sulzberger was told about it by Times reporters on Thursday.

Interviews show that the paper's leaders, in taking what they considered to be a principled stand, ultimately left the major decisions in the case up to Ms. Miller, an intrepid reporter whom editors found hard to control.

"This car had her hand on the wheel because she was the one at risk," Mr. Sulzberger said.

Once Ms. Miller was jailed, her lawyers were in open conflict about whether she should stay there. She had refused to reopen communications with Mr. Libby for a year, saying she did not want to pressure a source into waiving confidentiality. But in the end, saying "I owed it to myself" after two months of jail, she had her lawyer reach out to Mr. Libby. This time, hearing directly from her source, she accepted his permission and was set free.

"We have everything to be proud of and nothing to apologize for," Ms. Miller said in an interview Friday.

Neither The Times nor its cause has emerged unbruised. Three courts, including the Supreme Court, declined to back Ms. Miller. Critics said The Times was protecting not a whistle-blower but an administration campaign intended to squelch dissent. The Times's coverage of itself was under assault: While the editorial page had crusaded on Ms. Miller's behalf, the news department had more than once been scooped on the paper's own story, even including the news of Ms. Miller's release from jail.

Asked what she regretted about The Times's handling of the matter, Jill Abramson, a managing editor, said: "The entire thing."

A Divisive Newsroom Figure

In the spring of 2003, Ms. Miller returned from covering the war in Iraq, where she had been embedded with an American military team searching unsuccessfully for evidence of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Back in the States, another battle was brewing.

Ms. Miller had written a string of articles before the war - often based on the accounts of Bush administration officials and Iraqi defectors - strongly suggesting that Saddam Hussein was developing these weapons of mass destruction.

When no evidence of them was found, her reporting, along with that of some other journalists, came under fire. She was accused of writing articles that helped the Bush administration make its case for war.

"I told her there was unease, discomfort, unhappiness over some of the coverage," said Roger Cohen, who was the foreign editor at the time. "There was concern that she'd been convinced in an unwarranted way, a way that was not holding up, of the possible existence of W.M.D."

It was a blow to the reputation of Ms. Miller, an investigative reporter who has worked at The Times for three decades. Ms. Miller is known for her expertise in intelligence and security issues and her ability to cultivate relationships with influential sources in government. In 2002, she was part of a team of Times reporters that won a Pulitzer Prize for articles on Al Qaeda.

Inside the newsroom, she was a divisive figure. A few colleagues refused to work with her.

"Judy is a very intelligent, very pushy reporter," said Stephen Engelberg, who was Ms. Miller's editor at The Times for six years and is now a managing editor at The Oregonian in Portland. "Like a lot of investigative reporters, Judy benefits from having an editor who's very interested and involved with what she's doing."

In the year after Mr. Engelberg left the paper in 2002, though, Ms. Miller operated with a degree of autonomy rare at The Times.

Douglas Frantz, who succeeded Mr. Engelberg as the investigative editor, said that Ms. Miller once called herself "Miss Run Amok."

"I said, 'What does that mean?' " said Mr. Frantz, who was recently appointed managing editor at The Los Angeles Times. "And she said, 'I can do whatever I want.' "

Ms. Miller said she remembered the remark only vaguely but must have meant it as a joke, adding, "I have strong elbows, but I'm not a dope."

Ms. Miller said she was proud of her journalism career, including her work on Al Qaeda, biological warfare and Islamic militancy. But she acknowledged serious flaws in her articles on Iraqi weapons.

"W.M.D. - I got it totally wrong," she said. "The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them - we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could."

In two interviews, Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.

On July 30, 2003, Mr. Keller became executive editor after his predecessor, Howell Raines, was dismissed after a fabrication scandal involving a young reporter named Jayson Blair.

Within a few weeks, in one of his first personnel moves, Mr. Keller told Ms. Miller that she could no longer cover Iraq and weapons issues. Even so, Mr. Keller said, "she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm."

Although criticism of Ms. Miller's Iraq coverage mounted, Mr. Keller waited until May 26, 2004, to publish an editors' note that criticized some of the paper's coverage of the run-up to the war.

The note said the paper's articles on unconventional weapons were credulous. It did not name any reporters and said the failures were institutional. Five of the six articles called into question were written or co-written by Ms. Miller.

'A Good-Faith Source'

On June 23, 2003, Ms. Miller visited Mr. Libby at the Old Executive Office Building in Washington. Mr. Libby was the vice president's top aide and had played an important role in shaping the argument for going to war in Iraq. He was "a good-faith source who was usually straight with me," Ms. Miller said in an interview.

Her assignment was to write an article about the failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq. She said Mr. Libby wanted to talk about a diplomat's fact-finding trip in 2002 to the African nation of Niger to determine whether Iraq sought uranium there. The diplomat was Mr. Wilson, and his wife worked for the C.I.A.

Mr. Wilson had already become known among Washington insiders as a fierce Bush critic. He would go public the next month, accusing the White House in an opinion article in The Times of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

But Mr. Libby was already defending Vice President Dick Cheney, saying his boss knew nothing about Mr. Wilson or his findings. Ms. Miller said her notes leave open the possibility that Mr. Libby told her Mr. Wilson's wife might work at the agency.

On July 8, two days after Mr. Wilson's article appeared in The Times, the reporter and her source met again, for breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel, near the White House.

The notebook Ms. Miller used that day includes the reference to "Valerie Flame." But she said the name did not appear in the same portion of her notebook as the interview notes from Mr. Libby.

During the breakfast, Mr. Libby provided a detail about Ms. Wilson, saying she worked in a C.I.A. unit known as Winpac; the name stands for weapons intelligence, nonproliferation and arms control. Ms. Miller said she understood this to mean that Ms. Wilson was an analyst rather than an undercover operative.

Ms. Miller returned to the subject on July 12 in a phone call with Mr. Libby. Another variant on Valerie Wilson's name - "Victoria Wilson" - appears in the notes of that call. Ms. Miller had by then called other sources about Mr. Wilson's wife. In an interview, she would not discuss her sources.

Two days later, on July 14, Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist, wrote that Mr. Wilson's wife had suggested sending him to Niger, citing "two administration sources." He went on to say, without attributing the information, that Mr. Wilson's wife, "Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."

Ms. Miller's article on the hunt for missing weapons was published on July 20, 2003. It acknowledged that the hunt could turn out to be fruitless but focused largely on the obstacles the searchers faced.

Neither that article nor any in the following months by Ms. Miller discussed Mr. Wilson or his wife.

It is not clear why. Ms. Miller said in an interview that she "made a strong recommendation to my editor" that an article be pursued. "I was told no," she said. She would not identify the editor.

Ms. Abramson, the Washington bureau chief at the time, said Ms. Miller never made any such recommendation.

In the fall of 2003, after The Washington Post reported that "two top White House officials disclosed Plame's identity to at least six Washington journalists," Philip Taubman, Ms. Abramson's successor as Washington bureau chief, asked Ms. Miller and other Times reporters whether they were among the six. Ms. Miller denied it.

"The answer was generally no," Mr. Taubman said. Ms. Miller said the subject of Mr. Wilson and his wife had come up in casual conversation with government officials, Mr. Taubman said, but Ms. Miller said "she had not been at the receiving end of a concerted effort, a deliberate organized effort to put out information."

Enter a Special Prosecutor

The Novak column prompted a criminal investigation into whether government officials had violated a 1982 law that makes it a crime in some circumstances to disclose the identity of an undercover agent. At the end of December 2003, the United States attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, was appointed special prosecutor.

Around the same time, F.B.I. investigators working for Mr. Fitzgerald asked officials in the White House, including Mr. Libby, to sign waivers instructing reporters that they could disregard earlier promises of confidentiality and reveal who their sources were.

When Ms. Miller was subpoenaed in the investigation in August 2004, The Times immediately retained Floyd Abrams, who had often represented the paper and is a noted First Amendment lawyer.

The Times said it believes that attempts by prosecutors to force reporters to reveal confidential information must be resisted. Otherwise, it argues, the public would be deprived of important information about the government and other powerful institutions.

The fact that Ms. Miller's judgment had been questioned in the past did not affect its stance. "The default position in a case like that is you support the reporter," Mr. Keller said.

It was in these early days that Mr. Keller and Mr. Sulzberger learned Mr. Libby's identity. Neither man asked Ms. Miller detailed questions about her conversations with him.

Both said they viewed the case as a matter of principle, which made the particulars less important. "I didn't interrogate her about the details of the interview," Mr. Keller said. "I didn't ask to see her notes. And I really didn't feel the need to do that."

Still, Mr. Keller said the case was not ideal: "I wish it had been a clear-cut whistle-blower case. I wish it had been a reporter who came with less public baggage."

Times lawyers warned company executives that they would have trouble persuading a judge to excuse Ms. Miller from testifying. The Supreme Court decided in 1972 that the First Amendment offers reporters no protection from grand jury subpoenas.

Ms. Miller authorized Mr. Abrams to talk to Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph A. Tate. The question was whether Mr. Libby really wanted her to testify. Mr. Abrams passed the details of his conversation with Mr. Tate along to Ms. Miller and to Times executives and lawyers, people involved in the internal discussion said.

People present at the meetings said that what they heard about the preliminary negotiations was troubling.

Mr. Abrams told Ms. Miller and the group that Mr. Tate had said she was free to testify. Mr. Abrams said Mr. Tate also passed along some information about Mr. Libby's grand jury testimony: that he had not told Ms. Miller the name or undercover status of Mr. Wilson's wife.

That raised a potential conflict for Ms. Miller. Did the references in her notes to "Valerie Flame" and "Victoria Wilson" suggest that she would have to contradict Mr. Libby's account of their conversations? Ms. Miller said in an interview that she concluded that Mr. Tate was sending her a message that Mr. Libby did not want her to testify.

According to Ms. Miller, this was what Mr. Abrams told her about his conversation with Mr. Tate: "He was pressing about what you would say. When I wouldn't give him an assurance that you would exonerate Libby, if you were to cooperate, he then immediately gave me this, 'Don't go there, or, we don't want you there.' "

Mr. Abrams said: "On more than one occasion, Mr. Tate asked me for a recitation of what Ms. Miller would say. I did not provide one."

In an e-mail message Friday, Mr. Tate called Ms. Miller's interpretation "outrageous."

"I never once suggested that she should not testify," Mr. Tate wrote. "It was just the opposite. I told Mr. Abrams that the waiver was voluntary."

He added: " 'Don't go there' or 'We don't want you there' is not something I said, would say, or ever implied or suggested."

Telling another witness about grand jury testimony is lawful as long as it is not an attempt to influence the other witness's testimony.

"Judy believed Libby was afraid of her testimony," Mr. Keller said, noting that he did not know the basis for the fear. "She thought Libby had reason to be afraid of her testimony."

Ms. Miller and the paper decided at that point not to pursue additional negotiations with Mr. Tate.

The two sides did not talk for a year.

Ms. Miller said in an interview that she was waiting for Mr. Libby to call her, but he never did. "I interpreted the silence as, 'Don't testify,' " Ms. Miller said.

She and her lawyers have also said it was inappropriate for them to hound a source for permission to testify.

Mr. Tate, for his part, said the silence of the Miller side was mystifying.

"You never told me," Mr. Tate wrote to Mr. Abrams recently, "that your client did not accept my representation of voluntariness or that she wanted to speak personally to my client." Mr. Abrams does not dispute that.

Talks between Ms. Miller's lawyer and the prosecutor, Mr. Fitzgerald, were at a dead end, too.

Not long after breaking off communications with Mr. Tate, Mr. Abrams spoke to Mr. Fitzgerald twice in September 2004. Mr. Abrams wanted to narrow the scope of the questions Ms. Miller would be asked if she testified before the grand jury.

Mr. Abrams said he wanted Mr. Fitzgerald to question Ms. Miller only on her conversations with Mr. Libby about Ms. Wilson. And he wanted a promise that Mr. Fitzgerald would not call her back for further questioning after she testified once.

Mr. Fitzgerald said no. His spokesman declined to comment for this article.

With negotiations at an impasse, Ms. Miller and The Times turned to the courts but were rebuffed. In October 2004, Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the Federal District Court in Washington held Ms. Miller in contempt for not testifying. She remained free while she pursued appeals.

A few weeks later on Capitol Hill, in November 2004, Ms. Miller bumped into Robert S. Bennett, the prominent Washington criminal lawyer who represented President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and who is known for his blunt style and deal-making skills.

Ms. Miller recalled Mr. Bennett saying while he signed on to her case: "I don't want to represent a principle. I want to represent Judy Miller."

After the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, Ms. Miller made a final plea to Judge Hogan to stay out of jail: "My motive here is straightforward. A promise of confidentiality once made must be respected, or the journalist will lose all credibility and the public will, in the end, suffer."

Judge Hogan ordered her jailed at Alexandria Detention Center in Northern Virginia until she agreed to testify or the grand jury's term expired on Oct. 28.

"She has the keys to release herself," the judge said. "She has a waiver she chooses not to recognize."

Rising Tensions at Newspaper

While the paper's leaders were rallying around Ms. Miller's cause in public, inside The Times tensions were growing.

Throughout this year, reporters at the paper spent weeks trying to determine the identity of Ms. Miller's source. All the while, Mr. Keller knew it, but declined to tell his own reporters.

Even after reporters learned it from outside sources, The Times did not publish Mr. Libby's name, though other news organizations already had. The Times did not tell its readers that Mr. Libby was Ms. Miller's source until Sept. 30, in an article about Ms. Miller's release from jail.

Mr. Keller said that before Ms. Miller went to jail, Mr. Sulzberger, the publisher, asked him to participate in meetings on legal strategy and public statements. Mr. Keller said he then turned over the supervision of the newspaper's coverage of the case to Ms. Abramson, though he said he did not entirely step aside.

"It was just too awkward," Mr. Keller said, "to have me coming from meetings where they were discussing the company's public posture, then overseeing stories that were trying to deal with the company's public posture."

Ms. Abramson called The Times's coverage of the case "constrained." She said that if Ms. Miller was willing to go to jail to protect her source, it would have been "unconscionable then to out her source in the pages of the paper."

Mr. Keller and Ms. Abramson said this created an almost impossible tension between covering the case and the principle they believed to be at the heart of it.

Some reporters said editors seemed reluctant to publish articles about other aspects of the case as well, like how it was being investigated by Mr. Fitzgerald. In July, Richard W. Stevenson and other reporters in the Washington bureau wrote an article about the role of Mr. Cheney's senior aides, including Mr. Libby, in the leak case. The article, which did not disclose that Mr. Libby was Ms. Miller's source, was not published.

Mr. Stevenson said he was told by his editors that the article did not break enough new ground. "It was taken pretty clearly among us as a signal that we were cutting too close to the bone, that we were getting into an area that could complicate Judy's situation," he said.

In August, Douglas Jehl and David Johnston, two other Washington reporters, sent a memo to the Washington bureau chief, Mr. Taubman, listing ideas for coverage of the case. Mr. Taubman said Mr. Keller did not want them pursued because of the risk of provoking Mr. Fitzgerald or exposing Mr. Libby while Ms. Miller was in jail.

Mr. Taubman said he felt bad for his reporters, but he added that he and other senior editors felt that they had no choice. "No editor wants to be in the position of keeping information out of the newspaper," Mr. Taubman said.

Both Mr. Taubman and Ms. Abramson called the situation "excruciatingly difficult."

One result was that other news organizations broke developments in the case before The Times. Reporters found it especially frustrating when on the day that Ms. Miller left jail, The Times had an article prepared at 2 p.m. but delayed posting it on its Web site until after the news appeared on the Web site of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

"We end up being late on our own story," Mr. Johnston said.

There were other awkward moments. On Oct. 7, shortly before Ms. Miller was to conduct a telephone interview with two Times reporters, George Freeman, a Times company lawyer, sent her a four-page memorandum.

Ms. Miller and her outside lawyer, Mr. Bennett, reacted furiously, calling it a "script" and nearly canceling the interview. Mr. Freeman said later that he had prepared and sent what he called a "narrative" of what happened to Ms. Miller. Mr. Freeman said it had been written long before the interview with Ms. Miller had even been contemplated.

"It was not meant to be a script," Mr. Freeman said.

The editorial page, which is run by Mr. Sulzberger and Gail Collins, the editorial page editor, championed Ms. Miller's cause. The Times published more than 15 editorials and called for Congress to pass a shield law that would make it harder for federal prosecutors to compel reporters to testify.

Mr. Sulzberger said he did not personally write the editorials, but regularly urged Ms. Collins to devote space to them. After Ms. Miller was jailed, an editorial acknowledged that "this is far from an ideal case," before saying, "If Ms. Miller testifies, it may be immeasurably harder in the future to persuade a frightened government employee to talk about malfeasance in high places."

Asked in the interview whether he had any regrets about the editorials, given the outcome of the case, Mr. Sulzberger said no.

"I felt strongly that, one, Judy deserved the support of the paper in this cause - and the editorial page is the right place for such support, not the news pages," Mr. Sulzberger said. "And secondly, that this issue of a federal shield law is really important to the nation."

Ms. Miller said the publisher's support was invaluable. "He galvanized the editors, the senior editorial staff," she said. "He metaphorically and literally put his arm around me."

More Thoughts of a Waiver

Inside her cell in the Alexandria Detention Center this summer, Ms. Miller was able to peer through a narrow concrete slit to get an obstructed view of a maple tree and a concrete highway barrier. She was losing weight and struggling to sleep on two thin mats on a concrete slab.

Although she told friends that she was feeling isolated and frustrated, Ms. Miller said she comforted herself with thousands of letters, the supportive editorials in The Times and frequent 30-minute visits from more than 100 friends and colleagues. Among them were Mr. Sulzberger; Tom Brokaw, the former anchor at NBC News; Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism official; and John R. Bolton, the United States ambassador to the United Nations.

Every day, she checked outdated copies of The Times for a news article about her case. Most days she was disappointed.

She said she began thinking about whether she should reach out to Mr. Libby for "a personal, voluntary waiver."

"The longer I was there, the more chance I had to think about it," Ms. Miller said.

On July 20, William Safire, the former longtime columnist at The Times, testified about a federal shield law on Capitol Hill. Ms. Miller read his testimony and found it "inspiring."

While she mulled over her options, Mr. Bennett was urging her to allow him to approach Mr. Tate, Mr. Libby's lawyer, to try to negotiate a deal that would get her out of jail. Mr. Bennett wanted to revive the question of the waivers that Mr. Libby and other administration officials signed the previous year authorizing reporters to disclose their confidential discussions.

The other reporters subpoenaed in the case said such waivers were coerced. They said administration officials signed them only because they feared retribution from the prosecutor or the White House. Reporters for at least three news organizations had then gone back to their sources and obtained additional assurances that convinced them the waivers were genuine.

But Ms. Miller said she had not gotten an assurance that she felt would allow her to testify. And she said she felt that if Mr. Libby had wanted her to testify, he would have contacted her directly.

While Mr. Bennett urged Ms. Miller to test the waters, some of her other lawyers were counseling caution. Mr. Freeman, The Times's company lawyer, and Mr. Abrams worried that if Ms. Miller sought and received permission to testify and was released from jail, people would say that she and the newspaper had simply caved in.

"I was afraid that people would draw the wrong conclusions," Mr. Freeman said.

Mr. Freeman advised Ms. Miller to remain in jail until Oct. 28, when the term of the grand jury would expire and the investigation would presumably end.

Mr. Bennett thought that was a bad strategy; he argued that Mr. Fitzgerald would "almost certainly" empanel a new grand jury, which might mean Ms. Miller would have to spend an additional 18 months behind bars.

Mr. Freeman said he thought Mr. Fitzgerald was bluffing. Mr. Abrams was less sure. But he said Judge Hogan might release Ms. Miller if Mr. Fitzgerald tried to take further action against her.

"At that point," Ms. Miller said, "I realized if and when he did that, objectively things would change, and at that point, I might really be locked in."

After much deliberation, Ms. Miller said, she finally told Mr. Bennett to call Mr. Libby's lawyer. After two months in jail, Ms. Miller said, "I owed it to myself to see whether or not Libby had had a change of heart, the special prosecutor had had a change of heart."

Mr. Bennett called Mr. Tate on Aug. 31. Mr. Tate told Mr. Bennett that Mr. Libby had given permission to Ms. Miller to testify a year earlier. "I called Tate and this guy could not have been clearer - 'Bob, my client has given a waiver,' " Mr. Bennett said.

Mr. Fitzgerald wrote to Mr. Tate on Sept. 12, saying he was concerned that Ms. Miller was still in jail because of a "misunderstanding" between her and Mr. Libby.

Three days later, Ms. Miller heard from Mr. Libby.

In a folksy, conversational two-page letter dated Sept. 15, Mr. Libby assured Ms. Miller that he had wanted her to testify about their conversations all along. "I believed a year ago, as now, that testimony by all will benefit all," he wrote. And he noted that "the public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me."

When Ms. Miller testified before the grand jury, Mr. Fitzgerald asked her about the letter. She said she responded that it could be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby "to suggest that I, too, would say that we had not discussed Ms. Plame's identity." But she added that "my notes suggested that we had discussed her job."

Ms. Miller, though, wanted more than Mr. Libby's letter to feel free to testify. She told her lawyers that she still needed to hear from Mr. Libby in person. When that could not be arranged, she settled for a 10-minute jailhouse conference call on Sept. 19 with Mr. Libby, while two of her lawyers and one of Mr. Libby's listened in.

Ms. Miller said she was persuaded. "I mean, it's like the tone of the voice," she said. "When he talked to me about how unhappy he was that I was in jail, that he hadn't fully understood that I might have been going to jail just to protect him. He had thought there were other people whom I had been protecting. And there was kind of like an expression of genuine concern and sorrow."

Ms. Miller said she then "cross-examined" Mr. Libby. "When I pushed him hard, I said: 'Do you really want me to testify? Are you sure you really want me to testify?' He said something like: 'Absolutely. Believe it. I mean it.' "

At 1 p.m. on Sept. 26, Ms. Miller convened her lawyers in the jailhouse law library. All the lawyers agreed that Mr. Libby had released Ms. Miller from the pledge of confidentiality.

The next day, Mr. Bennett called Mr. Fitzgerald. He informed the prosecutor that Ms. Miller had a voluntary, personal waiver and asked Mr. Fitzgerald to restrict his questions to her conversations with Mr. Libby.

Mr. Bennett, who by now had carefully reviewed Ms. Miller's extensive notes taken from two interviews with Mr. Libby, assured Mr. Fitzgerald that Ms. Miller had only one meaningful source. Mr. Fitzgerald agreed to limit his questions to Mr. Libby and the Wilson matter.

Claudia Payne, a Times editor and a close friend of Ms. Miller, said that once Ms. Miller realized that her jail term could be extended, "it changed things a great deal. She said, 'I don't want to spend my life in here.' "

Ms. Payne added, "Her paramount concern was how her actions would be viewed by her colleagues."

On Sept. 29, Ms. Miller was released from jail and whisked by Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Keller to the Ritz-Carlton Georgetown for a massage, a manicure, a martini and a steak dinner. The next morning, she testified before the grand jury for three hours. Afterward, Ms. Miller declared that her ordeal was a victory for journalists and the public.

She testified before the grand jury for a second time on Wednesday about notes from her first meeting with Mr. Libby.

Last week, Mr. Sulzberger said it was impossible to know whether Ms. Miller could have struck a deal a year earlier, as at least four other journalists had done.

"Maybe a deal was possible earlier," Mr. Sulzberger said. "And maybe, in retrospect, looking back, you could say this was a moment you could have jumped on. If so, shame on us. I tend to think not."

A Puzzling Outcome

On Oct. 3, four days after Ms. Miller left jail, she returned to the headquarters of The New York Times on West 43rd Street.

Before entering the building, she called her friend Ms. Payne and asked her to come downstairs and escort her in. "She felt very frightened," Ms. Payne said. "She felt very vulnerable."

At a gathering in the newsroom, she made a speech claiming victories for press freedom. Her colleagues responded with restrained applause, seemingly as mystified by the outcome of her case as the public. (Video From Miller's Speech)

"You could see it in people's faces," Ms. Miller said later. "I'm a reporter. People were confused and perplexed, and I realized then that The Times and I hadn't done a very good job of making people understand what has been accomplished."

In the days since, The Times has been consumed by discussions about how the newspaper handled the case, how Times journalists covered the news of their own paper - and about Ms. Miller herself.

"Everyone admires our paper's willingness to stand behind us and our work, but most people I talk to have been troubled and puzzled by Judy's seeming ability to operate outside of conventional reportorial channels and managerial controls," said Todd S. Purdum, a Washington reporter for The Times. "Partly because of that, many people have worried about whether this was the proper fight to fight."

Diana B. Henriques, a business reporter, said she and others at the paper took "great pride and comfort" in how The Times stood by Ms. Miller. But she said the episode and speculation surrounding it "left a lot of people feeling confused and anxious" about Ms. Miller's role in the investigation.

On Tuesday, Ms. Miller is to receive a First Amendment award from the Society of Professional Journalists. She said she thought she would write a book about her experiences in the leak case, although she added that she did not yet have a book deal. She also plans on taking some time off but says she hopes to return to the newsroom.

She said she hopes to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country."

The Times incurred millions of dollars in legal fees in Ms. Miller's case. It limited its own ability to cover aspects of one of the biggest scandals of the day. Even as the paper asked for the public's support, it was unable to answer its questions.

"It's too early to judge it, and it's probably for other people to judge," said Mr. Keller, the executive editor. "I hope that people will remember that this institution stood behind a reporter, and the principle, when it wasn't easy to do that, or popular to do that."

Janny Scott contributed reporting for this article.

    The Miller Case: A Notebook, a Cause, a Jail Cell and a Deal, NYT, 16.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/national/16leak.html

A Personal Account

My Four Hours Testifying

in the Federal Grand Jury Room

October 16, 2005
The New York Times
By JUDITH MILLER

In July 2003, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, created a firestorm by publishing an essay in The New York Times that accused the Bush administration of using faulty intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. The administration, he charged, ignored findings of a secret mission he had undertaken for the Central Intelligence Agency - findings, he said, that undermined claims that Iraq was seeking uranium for a nuclear bomb.

It was the first time Mr. Wilson had gone public with his criticisms of the White House. Yet he had already become a focus of significant scrutiny at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

Almost two weeks earlier, in an interview with me on June 23, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, discussed Mr. Wilson's activities and placed blame for intelligence failures on the C.I.A. In later conversations with me, on July 8 and July 12, Mr. Libby, who is Mr. Cheney's top aide, played down the importance of Mr. Wilson's mission and questioned his performance.

My notes indicate that well before Mr. Wilson published his critique, Mr. Libby told me that Mr. Wilson's wife may have worked on unconventional weapons at the C.I.A.

My notes do not show that Mr. Libby identified Mr. Wilson's wife by name. Nor do they show that he described Valerie Wilson as a covert agent or "operative," as the conservative columnist Robert D. Novak first described her in a syndicated column published on July 14, 2003. (Mr. Novak used her maiden name, Valerie Plame.)

This is what I told a federal grand jury and the special counsel investigating whether administration officials committed a crime by leaking Ms. Plame's identity and the nature of her job to reporters.

During my testimony on Sept. 30 and Oct. 12, the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, asked me whether Mr. Libby had shared classified information with me during our several encounters before Mr. Novak's article. He also asked whether I thought Mr. Libby had tried to shape my testimony through a letter he sent to me in jail last month. And Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether Mr. Cheney had known what his chief aide was doing and saying.

My interview notes show that Mr. Libby sought from the beginning, before Mr. Wilson's name became public, to insulate his boss from Mr. Wilson's charges. According to my notes, he told me at our June meeting that Mr. Cheney did not know of Mr. Wilson, much less know that Mr. Wilson had traveled to Niger, in West Africa, to verify reports that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium for a weapons program.

As I told the grand jury, I recalled Mr. Libby's frustration and anger about what he called "selective leaking" by the C.I.A. and other agencies to distance themselves from what he recalled as their unequivocal prewar intelligence assessments. The selective leaks trying to shift blame to the White House, he told me, were part of a "perverted war" over the war in Iraq. I testified about these conversations after spending 85 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with the grand jury inquiry. Having been summoned to testify before the grand jury, I went to jail instead, to protect my source - Mr. Libby - because he had not communicated to me his personal and voluntary permission to speak.

At the behest of President Bush and Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Libby had signed a blanket form waiver, which his lawyer signaled to my counsel was not really voluntary, even though Mr. Libby's lawyer also said it had enabled other reporters to cooperate with the grand jury. But I believed that nothing short of a personal letter and a telephone call would allow me to assess whether Mr. Libby truly wished to free me from the pledge of confidentiality I had given him. The letter and the telephone call came last month.

Equally central to my decision was Mr. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor. He had declined to confine his questioning to the subject of Mr. Libby. This meant I would have been unable to protect other confidential sources who had provided information - unrelated to Mr. Wilson or his wife - for articles published in The Times. Last month, Mr. Fitzgerald agreed to limit his questioning.

Without both agreements, I would not have testified and would still be in jail.

I testified in Washington twice - most recently last Wednesday after finding a notebook in my office at The Times that contained my first interview with Mr. Libby. Mr. Fitzgerald told the grand jury that I was testifying as a witness and not as a subject or target of his inquiry.

This account is based on what I remember of my meetings with Mr. Fitzgerald and my testimony before the grand jury. I testified for almost four hours, much of that time taken by Mr. Fitzgerald asking me to decipher and explain my notes of my interviews with Mr. Libby, which I had provided to him.

I was not permitted to take notes of what I told the grand jury, and my interview notes on Mr. Libby are sketchy in places. It is also difficult, more than two years later, to parse the meaning and context of phrases, of underlining and of parentheses. On one page of my interview notes, for example, I wrote the name "Valerie Flame." Yet, as I told Mr. Fitzgerald, I simply could not recall where that came from, when I wrote it or why the name was misspelled.

I testified that I did not believe the name came from Mr. Libby, in part because the notation does not appear in the same part of my notebook as the interview notes from him.

The First Libby Meeting

Early in my grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to describe my history with Mr. Libby and explain how I came to interview him in 2003.

I said I had known Mr. Libby indirectly through my work as a co-author of "Germs," a book on biological weapons published in September 2001. Mr. Libby had assisted one of my co-authors, and the first time I met Mr. Libby he asked for an inscribed copy of "Germs."

In June 2003 I had just returned from Iraq, where I had been embedded with a special military unit charged with finding Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons. Now I was assigned to a team of reporters at The Times examining why no such weapons had been found.

On the afternoon of June 23, 2003, I arrived at the Old Executive Office Building to interview Mr. Libby, who was known to be an avid consumer of prewar intelligence assessments, which were already coming under fierce criticism. 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."

I recall that Mr. Libby was displeased with what he described as "selective leaking" by the C.I.A. He told me that the agency was engaged in a "hedging strategy" to protect itself in case no weapons were found in Iraq. "If we find it, fine, if not, we hedged," is how he described the strategy, my notes show.

I recall that Mr. Libby was angry about reports suggesting that senior administration officials, including Mr. Cheney, had embraced skimpy intelligence about Iraq's alleged efforts to buy uranium in Africa while ignoring evidence to the contrary. Such reports, he said, according to my notes, were "highly distorted."

Mr. Libby said the vice president's office had indeed pressed the Pentagon and the State Department for more information about reports that Iraq had renewed efforts to buy uranium. And Mr. Cheney, he said, had asked about the potential ramifications of such a purchase. But he added that the C.I.A. "took it upon itself to try and figure out more" by sending a "clandestine guy" to Niger to investigate. I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I thought "clandestine guy" was a reference to Mr. Wilson - Mr. Libby's first reference to him in my notes.

In May and in early June, Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist at The Times, wrote of Mr. Wilson's trip to Niger without naming him. Mr. Kristof wrote that Mr. Wilson had been sent to Niger "at the behest" of Mr. Cheney's office.

My notes indicate that Mr. Libby took issue with the suggestion that his boss had had anything to do with Mr. Wilson's trip. "Veep didn't know of Joe Wilson," I wrote, referring to the vice president. "Veep never knew what he did or what was said. Agency did not report to us."

Soon afterward Mr. Libby raised the subject of Mr. Wilson's wife for the first time. I wrote in my notes, inside parentheses, "Wife works in bureau?" I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I believed this was the first time I had been told that Mr. Wilson's wife might work for the C.I.A. The prosecutor asked me whether the word "bureau" might not mean the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Yes, I told him, normally. But Mr. Libby had been discussing the C.I.A., and therefore my impression was that he had been speaking about a particular bureau within the agency that dealt with the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. As to the question mark, I said I wasn't sure what it meant. Maybe it meant I found the statement interesting. Maybe Mr. Libby was not certain whether Mr. Wilson's wife actually worked there.

What was evident, I told the grand jury, was Mr. Libby's anger that Mr. Bush might have made inaccurate statements because the C.I.A. failed to share doubts about the Iraq intelligence.

"No briefer came in and said, 'You got it wrong, Mr. President,' " he said, according to my notes.

The Second Libby Meeting

I interviewed Mr. Libby for a second time on July 8, two days after Mr. Wilson published his essay attacking the administration on the Op-Ed Page of The Times.

Our meeting, which lasted about two hours, took place over breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington. I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I almost certainly began this interview by asking about Mr. Wilson's essay, which appeared to have agitated Mr. Libby. As I recall, Mr. Libby asserted that the essay was inaccurate.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked about a notation I made on the first page of my notes about this July 8 meeting, "Former Hill staffer."

My recollection, I told him, was that Mr. Libby wanted to modify our prior understanding that I would attribute information from him to a "senior administration official." When the subject turned to Mr. Wilson, Mr. Libby requested that he be identified only as a "former Hill staffer." I agreed to the new ground rules because I knew that Mr. Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill.

Did Mr. Libby explain this request? Mr. Fitzgerald asked. No, I don't recall, I replied. But I said I assumed Mr. Libby did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson.

Mr. Libby then proceeded through a lengthy and sharp critique of Mr. Wilson and what Mr. Libby viewed as the C.I.A.'s backpedaling on the intelligence leading to war. According to my notes, he began with a chronology of what he described as credible evidence of Iraq's efforts to procure uranium. As I told Mr. Fitzgerald and the grand jury, Mr. Libby alluded to the existence of two intelligence reports about Iraq's uranium procurement efforts. One report dated from February 2002. The other indicated that Iraq was seeking a broad trade relationship with Niger in 1999, a relationship that he said Niger officials had interpreted as an effort by Iraq to obtain uranium.

My notes indicate that Mr. Libby told me the report on the 1999 delegation had been attributed to Joe Wilson.

Mr. Libby also told me that on the basis of these two reports and other intelligence, his office had asked the C.I.A. for more analysis and investigation of Iraq's dealings with Niger. According to my interview notes, Mr. Libby told me that the resulting cable - based on Mr. Wilson's fact-finding mission, as it turned out - barely made it out of the bowels of the C.I.A. He asserted that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, had never even heard of Mr. Wilson.

As I told Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Libby also cited a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, produced by American intelligence agencies in October 2002, which he said had firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium.

An unclassified version of that estimate had been made public before my interviews with Mr. Libby. I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I had pressed Mr. Libby to discuss additional information that was in the more detailed, classified version of the estimate. I said I had told Mr. Libby that if The Times was going to do an article, the newspaper needed more than a recap of the administration's weapons arguments. According to my interview notes, though, it appears that Mr. Libby said little more than that the assessments of the classified estimate were even stronger than those in the unclassified version.

Although I was interested primarily in my area of expertise - chemical and biological weapons - my notes show that Mr. Libby consistently steered our conversation back to the administration's nuclear claims. His main theme echoed that of other senior officials: that contrary to Mr. Wilson's criticism, the administration had had ample reason to be concerned about Iraq's nuclear capabilities based on the regime's history of weapons development, its use of unconventional weapons and fresh intelligence reports.

At that breakfast meeting, our conversation also turned to Mr. Wilson's wife. My notes contain a phrase inside parentheses: "Wife works at Winpac." Mr. Fitzgerald asked what that meant. Winpac stood for Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control, the name of a unit within the C.I.A. that, among other things, analyzes the spread of unconventional weapons.

I said I couldn't be certain whether I had known Ms. Plame's identity before this meeting, and I had no clear memory of the context of our conversation that resulted in this notation. But I told the grand jury that I believed that this was the first time I had heard that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for Winpac. In fact, I told the grand jury that when Mr. Libby indicated that Ms. Plame worked for Winpac, I assumed that she worked as an analyst, not as an undercover operative.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me whether Mr. Libby had mentioned nepotism. I said no. And as I told the grand jury, I did not recall - and my interview notes do not show - that Mr. Libby suggested that Ms. Plame had helped arrange her husband's trip to Niger. My notes do suggest that our conversation about Ms. Plame was brief.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me about another entry in my notebook, where I had written the words "Valerie Flame," clearly a reference to Ms. Plame. Mr. Fitzgerald wanted to know whether the entry was based on my conversations with Mr. Libby. I said I didn't think so. I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I could recall discussing the Wilson-Plame connection with other sources. I said I had, though I could not recall any by name or when those conversations occurred.

Before the grand jury, Mr. Fitzgerald asked me questions about Mr. Cheney. He asked, for example, if Mr. Libby ever indicated whether Mr. Cheney had approved of his interviews with me or was aware of them. The answer was no.

In my grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to the subject of how Mr. Libby handled classified information with me. He asked, for example, whether I had discussed my security status with Mr. Libby. During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment "embedded" with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I had discussed classified information with Mr. Libby. I said I believed so, but could not be sure. He asked how Mr. Libby treated classified information. I said, Very carefully.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to examine a series of documents. Though I could not identify them with certainty, I said that some seemed familiar, and that they might be excerpts from the National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq's weapons. Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether Mr. Libby had shown any of the documents to me. I said no, I didn't think so. I thought I remembered him at one point reading from a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.

I told Mr. Fitzgerald that Mr. Libby might have thought I still had security clearance, given my special embedded status in Iraq. At the same time, I told the grand jury I thought that at our July 8 meeting I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me if I knew whether I was cleared to discuss classified information at the time of my meetings with Mr. Libby. I said I did not know.

The Third Libby Conversation

My third interview with Mr. Libby occurred on July 12, two days before Robert D. Novak's column identified Ms. Plame for the first time as a C.I.A. operative. I believe I spoke to Mr. Libby by telephone from my home in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

I told Mr. Fitzgerald I believed that before this call, I might have called others about Mr. Wilson's wife. In my notebook I had written the words "Victoria Wilson" with a box around it, another apparent reference to Ms. Plame, who is also known as Valerie Wilson.

I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I was not sure whether Mr. Libby had used this name or whether I just made a mistake in writing it on my own. Another possibility, I said, is that I gave Mr. Libby the wrong name on purpose to see whether he would correct me and confirm her identity.

I also told the grand jury I thought it was odd that I had written "Wilson" because my memory is that I had heard her referred to only as Plame. Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether this suggested that Mr. Libby had given me the name Wilson. I told him I didn't know and didn't want to guess.

My notes of this phone call show that Mr. Libby quickly turned to criticizing Mr. Wilson's report on his mission to Niger. He said it was unclear whether Mr. Wilson had spoken with any Niger officials who had dealt with Iraq's trade representatives.

With the understanding that I would attribute the information to an administration official, Mr. Libby also sought to explain why Mr. Bush included the disputed uranium allegation in his 2003 State of the Union address, a sentence of 16 words that his administration would later retract. Mr. Libby described it as the product of a simple miscommunication between the White House and the C.I.A.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether I ever pursued an article about Mr. Wilson and his wife. I told him I had not, though I considered her connection to the C.I.A. potentially newsworthy. I testified that I recalled recommending to editors that we pursue a story.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked my reaction to Mr. Novak's column. I told the grand jury I was annoyed at having been beaten on a story. I said I felt that since The Times had run Mr. Wilson's original essay, it had an obligation to explore any allegation that undercut his credibility. At the same time, I added, I also believed that the newspaper needed to pursue the possibility that the White House was unfairly attacking a critic of the administration.

Mr. Libby's Letter

When I was last before the grand jury, Mr. Fitzgerald posed a series of questions about a letter I received in jail last month from Mr. Libby. The letter, two pages long, encouraged me to testify. "Your reporting, and you, are missed," it begins.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to read the final three paragraphs aloud to the grand jury. "The public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me," Mr. Libby wrote.

The prosecutor asked my reaction to those words. I replied that this portion of the letter had surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby to suggest that I, too, would say we had not discussed Ms. Plame's identity. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job.

Mr. Fitzgerald also focused on the letter's closing lines. "Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning," Mr. Libby wrote. "They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."

How did I interpret that? Mr. Fitzgerald asked.

In answer, I told the grand jury about my last encounter with Mr. Libby. It came in August 2003, shortly after I attended a conference on national security issues held in Aspen, Colo. After the conference, I traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyo. At a rodeo one afternoon, a man in jeans, a cowboy hat and sunglasses approached me. He asked me how the Aspen conference had gone. I had no idea who he was.

"Judy," he said. "It's Scooter Libby."

My Four Hours Testifying in the Federal Grand Jury Room, NYT, 16.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/national/16miller.html

Under Bush,

a New Age of Prepackaged TV News

March 13, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID BARSTOW and ROBIN STEIN

It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.

"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.

To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.

This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.

Federal agencies are forthright with broadcasters about the origin of the news segments they distribute. The reports themselves, though, are designed to fit seamlessly into the typical local news broadcast. In most cases, the "reporters" are careful not to state in the segment that they work for the government. Their reports generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead, the government's news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration.

Some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare reform. Others focused on less prominent matters, like the administration's efforts to offer free after-school tutoring, its campaign to curb childhood obesity, its initiatives to preserve forests and wetlands, its plans to fight computer viruses, even its attempts to fight holiday drunken driving. They often feature "interviews" with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy.

Some of the segments were broadcast in some of nation's largest television markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta.

An examination of government-produced news reports offers a look inside a world where the traditional lines between public relations and journalism have become tangled, where local anchors introduce prepackaged segments with "suggested" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed on the other side as "independent" journalism.

It is also a world where all participants benefit.

Local affiliates are spared the expense of digging up original material. Public relations firms secure government contracts worth millions of dollars. The major networks, which help distribute the releases, collect fees from the government agencies that produce segments and the affiliates that show them. The administration, meanwhile, gets out an unfiltered message, delivered in the guise of traditional reporting.

The practice, which also occurred in the Clinton administration, is continuing despite President Bush's recent call for a clearer demarcation between journalism and government publicity efforts. "There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press," Mr. Bush told reporters in January, explaining why his administration would no longer pay pundits to support his policies.

In interviews, though, press officers for several federal agencies said the president's prohibition did not apply to government-made television news segments, also known as video news releases. They described the segments as factual, politically neutral and useful to viewers. They insisted that there was no similarity to the case of Armstrong Williams, a conservative columnist who promoted the administration's chief education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, without disclosing $240,000 in payments from the Education Department.

What is more, these officials argued, it is the responsibility of television news directors to inform viewers that a segment about the government was in fact written by the government. "Talk to the television stations that ran it without attribution," said William A. Pierce, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. "This is not our problem. We can't be held responsible for their actions."

Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials."

It is not certain, though, whether the office's pronouncements will have much practical effect. Although a few federal agencies have stopped making television news segments, others continue. And on Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings. The memorandum said the G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and "purely informational" news segments made by the government. Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency's role in producing them is disclosed to viewers.

Even if agencies do disclose their role, those efforts can easily be undone in a broadcaster's editing room. Some news organizations, for example, simply identify the government's "reporter" as one of their own and then edit out any phrase suggesting the segment was not of their making.

So in a recent segment produced by the Agriculture Department, the agency's narrator ended the report by saying "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary reporting for the U.S. Department of Agriculture." Yet AgDay, a syndicated farm news program that is shown on some 160 stations, simply introduced the segment as being by "AgDay's Pat O'Leary." The final sentence was then trimmed to "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary reporting."

Brian Conrady, executive producer of AgDay, defended the changes. "We can clip 'Department of Agriculture' at our choosing," he said. "The material we get from the U.S.D.A., if we choose to air it and how we choose to air it is our choice."

Spreading the Word: Government Efforts and One Woman's Role

Karen Ryan cringes at the phrase "covert propaganda." These are words for dictators and spies, and yet they have attached themselves to her like a pair of handcuffs.

Not long ago, Ms. Ryan was a much sought-after "reporter" for news segments produced by the federal government. A journalist at ABC and PBS who became a public relations consultant, Ms. Ryan worked on about a dozen reports for seven federal agencies in 2003 and early 2004. Her segments for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of National Drug Control Policy were a subject of the accountability office's recent inquiries.

The G.A.O. concluded that the two agencies "designed and executed" their segments "to be indistinguishable from news stories produced by private sector television news organizations." A significant part of that execution, the office found, was Ms. Ryan's expert narration, including her typical sign-off - "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting" - delivered in a tone and cadence familiar to television reporters everywhere.

Last March, when The New York Times first described her role in a segment about new prescription drug benefits for Medicare patients, reaction was harsh. In Cleveland, The Plain Dealer ran an editorial under the headline "Karen Ryan, You're a Phony," and she was the object of late-night jokes by Jon Stewart and received hate mail.

"I'm like the Marlboro man," she said in a recent interview.

In fact, Ms. Ryan was a bit player who made less than $5,000 for her work on government reports. She was also playing an accepted role in a lucrative art form, the video news release. "I just don't feel I did anything wrong," she said. "I just did what everyone else in the industry was doing."

It is a sizable industry. One of its largest players, Medialink Worldwide Inc., has about 200 employees, with offices in New York and London. It produces and distributes about 1,000 video news releases a year, most commissioned by major corporations. The Public Relations Society of America even gives an award, the Bronze Anvil, for the year's best video news release.

Several major television networks play crucial intermediary roles in the business. Fox, for example, has an arrangement with Medialink to distribute video news releases to 130 affiliates through its video feed service, Fox News Edge. CNN distributes releases to 750 stations in the United States and Canada through a similar feed service, CNN Newsource. Associated Press Television News does the same thing worldwide with its Global Video Wire.

"We look at them and determine whether we want them to be on the feed," David M. Winstrom, director of Fox News Edge, said of video news releases. "If I got one that said tobacco cures cancer or something like that, I would kill it."

In essence, video news releases seek to exploit a growing vulnerability of television news: Even as news staffs at the major networks are shrinking, many local stations are expanding their hours of news coverage without adding reporters.

"No TV news organization has the resources in labor, time or funds to cover every worthy story," one video news release company, TVA Productions, said in a sales pitch to potential clients, adding that "90 percent of TV newsrooms now rely on video news releases."

Federal agencies have been commissioning video news releases since at least the first Clinton administration. An increasing number of state agencies are producing television news reports, too; the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department alone has produced some 500 video news releases since 1993.

Under the Bush administration, federal agencies appear to be producing more releases, and on a broader array of topics.

A definitive accounting is nearly impossible. There is no comprehensive archive of local television news reports, as there is in print journalism, so there is no easy way to determine what has been broadcast, and when and where.

Still, several large agencies, including the Defense Department, the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, acknowledge expanded efforts to produce news segments. Many members of Mr. Bush's first-term cabinet appeared in such segments.

A recent study by Congressional Democrats offers another rough indicator: the Bush administration spent $254 million in its first term on public relations contracts, nearly double what the last Clinton administration spent.

Karen Ryan was part of this push - a "paid shill for the Bush administration," as she self-mockingly puts it. It is, she acknowledges, an uncomfortable title.

Ms. Ryan, 48, describes herself as not especially political, and certainly no Bush die-hard. She had hoped for a long career in journalism. But over time, she said, she grew dismayed by what she saw as the decline of television news - too many cut corners, too many ratings stunts.

In the end, she said, the jump to video news releases from journalism was not as far as one might expect. "It's almost the same thing," she said.

There are differences, though. When she went to interview Tommy G. Thompson, then the health and human services secretary, about the new Medicare drug benefit, it was not the usual reporter-source exchange. First, she said, he already knew the questions, and she was there mostly to help him give better, snappier answers. And second, she said, everyone involved is aware of a segment's potential political benefits.

Her Medicare report, for example, was distributed in January 2004, not long before Mr. Bush hit the campaign trail and cited the drug benefit as one of his major accomplishments.

The script suggested that local anchors lead into the report with this line: "In December, President Bush signed into law the first-ever prescription drug benefit for people with Medicare." In the segment, Mr. Bush is shown signing the legislation as Ms. Ryan describes the new benefits and reports that "all people with Medicare will be able to get coverage that will lower their prescription drug spending."

The segment made no mention of the many critics who decry the law as an expensive gift to the pharmaceutical industry. The G.A.O. found that the segment was "not strictly factual," that it contained "notable omissions" and that it amounted to "a favorable report" about a controversial program.

And yet this news segment, like several others narrated by Ms. Ryan, reached an audience of millions. According to the accountability office, at least 40 stations ran some part of the Medicare report. Video news releases distributed by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, including one narrated by Ms. Ryan, were shown on 300 stations and reached 22 million households. According to Video Monitoring Services of America, a company that tracks news programs in major cities, Ms. Ryan's segments on behalf of the government were broadcast a total of at least 64 times in the 40 largest television markets.

Even these measures, though, do not fully capture the reach of her work. Consider the case of News 10 Now, a cable station in Syracuse owned by Time Warner. In February 2004, days after the government distributed its Medicare segment, News 10 Now broadcast a virtually identical report, including the suggested anchor lead-in. The News 10 Now segment, however, was not narrated by Ms. Ryan. Instead, the station edited out the original narration and had one of its reporters repeat the script almost word for word.

The station's news director, Sean McNamara, wrote in an e-mail message, "Our policy on provided video is to clearly identify the source of that video." In the case of the Medicare report, he said, the station believed it was produced and distributed by a major network and did not know that it had originally come from the government.

Ms. Ryan said she was surprised by the number of stations willing to run her government segments without any editing or acknowledgement of origin. As proud as she says she is of her work, she did not hesitate, even for a second, when asked if she would have broadcast one of her government reports if she were a local news director.

"Absolutely not."

Little Oversight: TV's Code of Ethics, With Uncertain Weight

"Clearly disclose the origin of information and label all material provided by outsiders."

Those words are from the code of ethics of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, the main professional society for broadcast news directors in the United States. Some stations go further, all but forbidding the use of any outside material, especially entire reports. And spurred by embarrassing publicity last year about Karen Ryan, the news directors association is close to proposing a stricter rule, said its executive director, Barbara Cochran.

Whether a stricter ethics code will have much effect is unclear; it is not hard to find broadcasters who are not adhering to the existing code, and the association has no enforcement powers.

The Federal Communications Commission does, but it has never disciplined a station for showing government-made news segments without disclosing their origin, a spokesman said.

Could it? Several lawyers experienced with F.C.C. rules say yes. They point to a 2000 decision by the agency, which stated, "Listeners and viewers are entitled to know by whom they are being persuaded."

In interviews, more than a dozen station news directors endorsed this view without hesitation. Several expressed disdain for the prepackaged segments they received daily from government agencies, corporations and special interest groups who wanted to use their airtime and credibility to sell or influence.

But when told that their stations showed government-made reports without attribution, most reacted with indignation. Their stations, they insisted, would never allow their news programs to be co-opted by segments fed from any outside party, let alone the government.

"They're inherently one-sided, and they don't offer the possibility for follow-up questions - or any questions at all," said Kathy Lehmann Francis, until recently the news director at WDRB, the Fox affiliate in Louisville, Ky.

Yet records from Video Monitoring Services of America indicate that WDRB has broadcast at least seven Karen Ryan segments, including one for the government, without disclosing their origin to viewers.

Mike Stutz, news director at KGTV, the ABC affiliate in San Diego, was equally opposed to putting government news segments on the air.

"It amounts to propaganda, doesn't it?" he said.

Again, though, records from Video Monitoring Services of America show that from 2001 to 2004 KGTV ran at least one government-made segment featuring Ms. Ryan, 5 others featuring her work on behalf of corporations, and 19 produced by corporations and other outside organizations. It does not appear that KGTV viewers were told the origin of these 25 segments.

"I thought we were pretty solid," Mr. Stutz said, adding that they intend to take more precautions.

Confronted with such evidence, most news directors were at a loss to explain how the segments made it on the air. Some said they were unable to find archive tapes that would help answer the question. Others promised to look into it, then stopped returning telephone messages. A few removed the segments from their Web sites, promised greater vigilance in the future or pleaded ignorance.

Afghanistan to Memphis: An Agency's Report Ends Up on the Air

On Sept. 11, 2002, WHBQ, the Fox affiliate in Memphis, marked the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with an uplifting report on how assistance from the United States was helping to liberate the women of Afghanistan.

Tish Clark, a reporter for WHBQ, described how Afghan women, once barred from schools and jobs, were at last emerging from their burkas, taking up jobs as seamstresses and bakers, sending daughters off to new schools, receiving decent medical care for the first time and even participating in a fledgling democracy. Her segment included an interview with an Afghan teacher who recounted how the Taliban only allowed boys to attend school. An Afghan doctor described how the Taliban refused to let male physicians treat women.

In short, Ms. Clark's report seemed to corroborate, however modestly, a central argument of the Bush foreign policy, that forceful American intervention abroad was spreading freedom, improving lives and winning friends.

What the people of Memphis were not told, though, was that the interviews used by WHBQ were actually conducted by State Department contractors. The contractors also selected the quotes used from those interviews and shot the video that went with the narration. They also wrote the narration, much of which Ms. Clark repeated with only minor changes.

As it happens, the viewers of WHBQ were not the only ones in the dark.

Ms. Clark, now Tish Clark Dunning, said in an interview that she, too, had no idea the report originated at the State Department. "If that's true, I'm very shocked that anyone would false report on anything like that," she said.

How a television reporter in Memphis unwittingly came to narrate a segment by the State Department reveals much about the extent to which government-produced news accounts have seeped into the broader new media landscape.

The explanation begins inside the White House, where the president's communications advisers devised a strategy after Sept. 11, 2001, to encourage supportive news coverage of the fight against terrorism. The idea, they explained to reporters at the time, was to counter charges of American imperialism by generating accounts that emphasized American efforts to liberate and rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq.

An important instrument of this strategy was the Office of Broadcasting Services, a State Department unit of 30 or so editors and technicians whose typical duties include distributing video from news conferences. But in early 2002, with close editorial direction from the White House, the unit began producing narrated feature reports, many of them promoting American achievements in Afghanistan and Iraq and reinforcing the administration's rationales for the invasions. These reports were then widely distributed in the United States and around the world for use by local television stations. In all, the State Department has produced 59 such segments.

United States law contains provisions intended to prevent the domestic dissemination of government propaganda. The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, for example, allows Voice of America to broadcast pro-government news to foreign audiences, but not at home. Yet State Department officials said that law does not apply to the Office of Broadcasting Services. In any event, said Richard A. Boucher, a State Department spokesman: "Our goal is to put out facts and the truth. We're not a propaganda agency."

Even so, as a senior department official, Patricia Harrison, told Congress last year, the Bush administration has come to regard such "good news" segments as "powerful strategic tools" for influencing public opinion. And a review of the department's segments reveals a body of work in sync with the political objectives set forth by the White House communications team after 9/11.

In June 2003, for example, the unit produced a segment that depicted American efforts to distribute food and water to the people of southern Iraq. "After living for decades in fear, they are now receiving assistance - and building trust - with their coalition liberators," the unidentified narrator concluded.

Several segments focused on the liberation of Afghan women, which a White House memo from January 2003 singled out as a "prime example" of how "White House-led efforts could facilitate strategic, proactive communications in the war on terror."

Tracking precisely how a "good news" report on Afghanistan could have migrated to Memphis from the State Department is far from easy. The State Department typically distributes its segments via satellite to international news organizations like Reuters and Associated Press Television News, which in turn distribute them to the major United States networks, which then transmit them to local affiliates.

"Once these products leave our hands, we have no control," Robert A. Tappan, the State Department's deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, said in an interview. The department, he said, never intended its segments to be shown unedited and without attribution by local news programs. "We do our utmost to identify them as State Department-produced products."

Representatives for the networks insist that government-produced reports are clearly labeled when they are distributed to affiliates. Yet with segments bouncing from satellite to satellite, passing from one news organization to another, it is easy to see the potential for confusion. Indeed, in response to questions from The Times, Associated Press Television News acknowledged that they might have distributed at least one segment about Afghanistan to the major United States networks without identifying it as the product of the State Department. A spokesman said it could have "slipped through our net because of a sourcing error."

Kenneth W. Jobe, vice president for news at WHBQ in Memphis, said he could not explain how his station came to broadcast the State Department's segment on Afghan women. "It's the same piece, there's no mistaking it," he said in an interview, insisting that it would not happen again.

Mr. Jobe, who was not with WHBQ in 2002, said the station's script for the segment has no notes explaining its origin. But Tish Clark Dunning said it was her impression at the time that the Afghan segment was her station's version of one done first by network correspondents at either Fox News or CNN. It is not unusual, she said, for a local station to take network reports and then give them a hometown look.

"I didn't actually go to Afghanistan," she said. "I took that story and reworked it. I had to do some research on my own. I remember looking on the Internet and finding out how it all started as far as women covering their faces and everything."

At the State Department, Mr. Tappan said the broadcasting office is moving away from producing narrated feature segments. Instead, the department is increasingly supplying only the ingredients for reports - sound bites and raw video. Since the shift, he said, even more State Department material is making its way into news broadcasts.

Meeting a Need: Rising Budget Pressures, Ready-to-Run Segments

WCIA is a small station with a big job in central Illinois.

Each weekday, WCIA's news department produces a three-hour morning program, a noon broadcast and three evening programs. There are plans to add a 9 p.m. broadcast. The staff, though, has been cut to 37 from 39. "We are doing more with the same," said Jim P. Gee, the news director.

Farming is crucial in Mr. Gee's market, yet with so many demands, he said, "it is hard for us to justify having a reporter just focusing on agriculture."

To fill the gap, WCIA turned to the Agriculture Department, which has assembled one of the most effective public relations operations inside the federal government. The department has a Broadcast Media and Technology Center with an annual budget of $3.2 million that each year produces some 90 "mission messages" for local stations - mostly feature segments about the good works of the Agriculture Department.

"I don't want to use the word 'filler,' per se, but they meet a need we have," Mr. Gee said.

The Agriculture Department's two full-time reporters, Bob Ellison and Pat O'Leary, travel the country filing reports, which are vetted by the department's office of communications before they are distributed via satellite and mail. Alisa Harrison, who oversees the communications office, said Mr. Ellison and Mr. O'Leary provide unbiased, balanced and accurate coverage.

"They cover the secretary just like any other reporter," she said.

Invariably, though, their segments offer critic-free accounts of the department's policies and programs. In one report, Mr. Ellison told of the agency's efforts to help Florida clean up after several hurricanes.

''They've done a fantastic job,'' a grateful local official said in the segment.

More recently, Mr. Ellison reported that Mike Johanns, the new agriculture secretary, and the White House were determined to reopen Japan to American beef products. Of his new boss, Mr. Ellison reported, ''He called Bush the best envoy in the world.''

WCIA, based in Champaign, has run 26 segments made by the Agriculture Department over the past three months alone. Or put another way, WCIA has run 26 reports that did not cost it anything to produce.

Mr. Gee, the news director, readily acknowledges that these accounts are not exactly independent, tough-minded journalism. But, he added: ''We don't think they're propaganda. They meet our journalistic standards. They're informative. They're balanced.''

More than a year ago, WCIA asked the Agriculture Department to record a special sign-off that implies the segments are the work of WCIA reporters. So, for example, instead of closing his report with ''I'm Bob Ellison, reporting for the U.S.D.A.,'' Mr. Ellison says, ''With the U.S.D.A., I'm Bob Ellison, reporting for 'The Morning Show.'''

Mr. Gee said the customized sign-off helped raise ''awareness of the name of our station.'' Could it give viewers the idea that Mr. Ellison is reporting on location with the U.S.D.A. for WCIA? ''We think viewers can make up their own minds,'' Mr. Gee said.

Ms. Harrison, the Agriculture Department press secretary, said the WCIA sign-off was an exception. The general policy, she said, is to make clear in each segment that the reporter works for the department. In any event, she added, she did not think there was much potential for viewer confusion. ''It's pretty clear to me,'' she said.

The 'Good News' People: A Menu of Reports From Military Hot Spots

The Defense Department is working hard to produce and distribute its own news segments for television audiences in the United States.

The Pentagon Channel, available only inside the Defense Department last year, is now being offered to every cable and satellite operator in the United States. Army public affairs specialists, equipped with portable satellite transmitters, are roaming war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, beaming news reports, raw video and interviews to TV stations in the United States. All a local news director has to do is log on to a military-financed Web site, www.dvidshub.net, browse a menu of segments and request a free satellite feed.

Then there is the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service, a unit of 40 reporters and producers set up to send local stations news segments highlighting the accomplishments of military members.

''We're the 'good news' people,'' said Larry W. Gilliam, the unit's deputy director.

Each year, the unit films thousands of soldiers sending holiday greetings to their hometowns. Increasingly, the unit also produces news reports that reach large audiences. The 50 stories it filed last year were broadcast 236 times in all, reaching 41 million households in the United States.

The news service makes it easy for local stations to run its segments unedited. Reporters, for example, are never identified by their military titles. ''We know if we put a rank on there they're not going to put it on their air,'' Mr. Gilliam said.

Each account is also specially tailored for local broadcast. A segment sent to a station in Topeka, Kan., would include an interview with a service member from there. If the same report is sent to Oklahoma City, the soldier is switched out for one from Oklahoma City. ''We try to make the individual soldier a star in their hometown,'' Mr. Gilliam said, adding that segments were distributed only to towns and cities selected by the service members interviewed.

Few stations acknowledge the military's role in the segments. ''Just tune in and you'll see a minute-and-a-half news piece and it looks just like they went out and did the story,'' Mr. Gilliam said. The unit, though, makes no attempt to advance any particular political or policy agenda, he said.

''We don't editorialize at all,'' he said.

Yet sometimes the ''good news'' approach carries political meaning, intended or not. Such was the case after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal surfaced last spring. Although White House officials depicted the abuse of Iraqi detainees as the work of a few rogue soldiers, the case raised serious questions about the training of military police officers.

A short while later, Mr. Gilliam's unit distributed a news segment, sent to 34 stations, that examined the training of prison guards at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, where some of the military police officers implicated at Abu Ghraib had been trained.

''One of the most important lessons they learn is to treat prisoners strictly but fairly,'' the reporter said in the segment, which depicted a regimen emphasizing respect for detainees. A trainer told the reporter that military police officers were taught to ''treat others as they would want to be treated.'' The account made no mention of Abu Ghraib or how the scandal had prompted changes in training at Fort Leonard Wood.

According to Mr. Gilliam, the report was unrelated to any effort by the Defense Department to rebut suggestions of a broad command failure.

''Are you saying that the Pentagon called down and said, 'We need some good publicity?''' he asked. ''No, not at all.''

Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting for this article.

    Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News, NYT, 13.3.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/13covert.html

New York Times:

Reporter routinely faked articles

Probe alleges made-up quotes,

plagiarism in at least 36 stories

Sunday, May 11, 2003

Posted: 4:30 PM EDT (2030 GMT)
CNN

NEW YORK (CNN) --The New York Times has concluded, after an extensive internal investigation, that one of its former reporters committed "frequent acts of journalistic fraud."

In a 7,500 word article published Saturday on its Web site, the prestigious newspaper accuses the reporter of making up reports from other cities while writing from his apartment in Brooklyn. The paper says the reporter invented quotes, wrote about scenery from published photographs and stole material from other news organizations.

The article, to be published in Sunday's print editions, details how reporter Jayson Blair, 27, was quickly promoted through the ranks from intern to the national desk despite a history of corrections, sloppy reporting and lectures from his editors.

Blair did not comment on the paper's investigation, though he was given numerous opportunities to defend himself or provide accurate information, the newspaper reported.

Blair started as an intern who was promoted to a full-time job covering police and eventually covered such high-profile stories as the Washington-area sniper investigation and the homecoming of rescued prisoner of war Pfc. Jessica Lynch. The Times articles calls Blair's career a "profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper."

Blair resigned this month after the San Antonio Express-News raised questions about whether he had plagiarized its story about the family of a soldier missing in Iraq.

The Times said its own investigation showed Blair's deceptions to be much more widespread, with problems in at least 36 of the 73 articles Blair had written since transferring to the national desk in October. The investigation is continuing into more than 600 articles he wrote, and the paper is urging readers who know of additional discrepancies to come forward.

Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. called the revelations "a huge black eye.

"It's an abrogation of the trust between the newspaper and its readers," he said.

The paper said its investigation showed that Blair, while assigned as a roving national reporter, was actually spending much of his time in New York when his editors thought he was covering stories in remote locations. Blair turned in receipts from New York restaurants and stores that he portrayed as receipts from his travels. He never asked to be reimbursed for flights, hotels or rental cars, the newspaper reported.

To create the illusion that he was on the scene, the Times alleged, Blair peppered his stories with details obtained from photographs of the events and material from other news organizations.

He used his cell phone and computer to communicate with editors, pretending to be on assignment in another city.

Quotes in stories were attributed to people who have subsequently told the Times they never spoke to Blair, the Times reported. One of those instances involved Lynch's family.

According to the Times, no one in Lynch's family remembers speaking to Blair, even though he filed five articles, datelined from their hometown of Palestine, West Virginia, that vividly described them and their home. The article described the home as overlooking tobacco fields and cattle pastures, when it, in fact, does not.

Probe also faults reporter's supervisors
The investigation also raised questions about the editorial supervision of Blair, who came to the paper in June 1999 after having worked as an intern there the previous summer while a student at the University of Maryland. When he was hired, Times officials assumed he had graduated, but college officials say he has a year of course work left to complete, the Times reported.

By January 2001, Blair had worked his way from police reporter to staff reporter on the metropolitan desk, even though some of the editors with whom he worked expressed concerns about his work, according to the Times investigation.

In April 2002, Jonathan Landman, the metropolitan editor, was so concerned about the quality of Blair's work and the number of errors he was making that he sent an e-mail to newsroom administrators saying, "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now."

Blair was eventually promoted.

Blair was reprimanded and took the first of two brief leaves. He was watched closely for a short time, and the accuracy of his work improved, the newspaper reported. Soon he was transferred to the national desk, where he was sent to cover the Washington-area sniper shootings last fall.

Shortly after receiving the assignment, Blair wrote a front-page exclusive that reported that the U.S. attorney had forced investigators to end their interrogation of suspect John Muhammad just as he was ready to confess. He attributed the information to five unnamed law enforcement sources.

Blair's editors never asked him to identify the sources, the Times reported, and the paper concedes that the article, which drew fire from federal officials at the time, was flawed.

National editors said they were unaware of Blair's accuracy problems and said they would have asked more questions if they had known of previous editors' concerns. The newspaper conceded that poor communication among senior editors, as well as a lack of complaints from the subjects of his articles, allowed Blair to escape detection.

Blair's expense reports also did not raise a red flag at the Times, despite the fact that he did not submit a single receipt for a hotel room, rental car or airplane ticket during a five-month period when he purportedly filed stories from 20 cities in six states, the Times reported.

Blair, who is black, came to the Times as part of an internship program designed to help the paper attract more minority reporters. Times officials insisted that fact had nothing to do with his subsequent hiring and quick rise to full reporter status, despite editors' concerns about his work.

"He was a young, promising reporter who had done a job that warranted promotion," said Gerald Boyd, the paper's managing editor.

    New York Times: Reporter routinely faked articles, CNN, 11.5.2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Northeast/05/10/ny.times.reporter/

Boston Globe columnist resigns,

accused of fabrications

'I attributed quotes to people who didn't exist'
Named a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year

June 19, 1998
Web posted at: 1:47 a.m. EDT (0547 GMT)
CNN.com

BOSTON (CNN) -- An award-winning metro columnist for The Boston Globe resigned Thursday after being asked to leave by the paper's editor, who said she admitted to fabricating people and quotes in four columns this year.

"Patricia Smith is a writer of extraordinary talent and this is a tragic development," Matthew Storin, the paper's editor, said in a statement. "We wish her well and she retains many friends at the Globe, including myself."

Smith's agent and lawyer, John "Ike" Williams, said "Patricia has resigned," the Globe said.

Smith, 42, who is also a well-known poet, did not return phone calls.

In a column being published in Friday's Globe, Smith apologizes to her readers, to the paper, and to her late father, who she credits as an inspiration to her journalism career.

"I attributed quotes to people who didn't exist"

"From time to time in my metro column, to create the desired impact or slam home a salient point, I attributed quotes to people who didn't exist," Smith wrote in her final column, which the Globe made available late Thursday. The column was to be accompanied by a news story by the Globe's media critic.

"I could give them names, even occupations, but I couldn't give them what they needed most -- a heartbeat. As anyone who's ever touched a newspaper knows, that's one of the cardinal sins of journalism: Thou shall not fabricate. No exceptions. No excuses."

The fabrications, from columns in April and May, were discovered two weeks ago during a routine review by Globe editors, Storin's statement said.

"I do promise that we will give a full accounting to our readers of what we have found to date," Storin said. "Anything that further research reveals will be disclosed in a timely manner."

The fabrications, from columns in April and May, were discovered two weeks ago during a routine review by Globe editors, Storin's statement said.

"Obviously, each of them violates the sacred trust that the Globe has with its readers," Storin said.

Smith admitted the fabrications after being questioned by her editor, Greg Moore, Storin said.

Named a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year

Earlier this year, Smith -- who wrote twice a week for the newspaper -- was named as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, journalism's highest honor. None of the questionable columns were included in Smith's Pulitzer application, Gulla said.

Smith began her newspaper career as a typist with the Chicago Daily News. She joined the Globe in 1990 and was named a columnist in 1994. She was one of three writers who rotated columns on the front page of the metro section.

Smith won the Distinguished Writing Award for Commentary from the American Society of Newspaper Editors for a series of columns published in 1997.

News of Smith's alleged fabrications comes soon after the highly publicized dismissal from The New Republic of associate editor Stephen Glass, accused of fabricating material in 27 of 41 articles he had written for the weekly magazine over the past three years.

Glass was fired last month after confessing he had "embellished" a story about computer hackers. The article ran in the magazine's May 18 issue.

Glass did not contest the findings and apologized this week in letters to the magazine's editor and owner.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Boston Globe columnist resigns, accused of fabrications, 19.6.1998, CNN.com,
http://www.cnn.com/US/9806/19/globe.columnist.resigns/




 

Related

Journalism.org

the Project for Excellence in Journalism

and the Committee of Concerned Journalists

https://www.journalism.org/

New York Times reporter Jayson Blair > plagiarism and faked reports

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Jayson_Blair

http://www.journalism.org/resources/briefing/archive/blair.asp#blair

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/national/BLAIR-ARCHIVE.html

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/media/BLAIR-ARCHIVE.html

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Northeast/05/10/ny.times.reporter/

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Northeast/05/13/ny.times.investigation/

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/media/media_ethics/casestudy_blair.php

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june03/nytimes_06-05.html