A marriage made in heaven: Miller and Fox
Cue the violins... Howard Kurtz reports that Fox News has hired disgraced propagandist Judy Miller to do on-air analysis and write for their website. (HT: Think Progress's Amanda, who gives some good links on the topic here.)
As Kurtz notes, "In the run-up to the Iraq war, Miller reported stories on the search for Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be untrue."
He quotes Fox Senior Vice-President John Moody as saying merely, "We've all had stories that didn't come out exactly as we had hoped."
That's nonsense. Here's what a reporter does: She or he reports on what has already happened Or, if the facts of what has happened are still unclear, she writes about as much as she can verifiably report on, identifying her sources with as much frankness as possible, and perhaps indicating the areas she has been unable to fully verify or understand.
She does not knowingly use unsubstantiated or unsubstantiable allegations, "reporting" them as if they are the truth.
Also, a reporter does not speculate about the future, or about what "may perhaps" be known in the future.
In that sense, Moody's comment that "We've all had stories that didn't come out exactly as we had hoped" makes no sense at all. Reporters' stories only "come out" differently than the reporter hopes if something happens to them in the editing process that distorts the meaning that the reporter clearly intended to convey. (It happens.) But that has nothing-- nothing!-- to do with a reported speculation, which is all that Miller was purveying in her dreadful and actively inflammatory reporting pre-March 2003, "coming out" differently in real life once the speculation has proven to be quite ill-founded.
Moody's use of words tells us a lot about the relationship Fox News has with the whole concept of careful, evidence-based reporting: Tenuous at best, perhaps downright contemptuous at worst.
Judy Miller should fit right in.
Par for the course over at Faux. When the US Government shut down the DC office of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI) -- as a terrorist, Islamic-marxist cult -- Faux hired their chief propagandist to be their Iran "analyst".... See:
http://www.newshounds.us/2006/09/02/is_fox_news_foreign_affairs_analyst_a_former_terrorist.php
and of course, before that, Faux had a bizarre relationship with "Professor" "Rob" Sobhani.... who appeared hundreds of times from 2001-2004.... Sobhani is the de facto foreign minister for the Shah-in-waiting....
Unfortunately this tendency to promote the government line is not peculiar to Judy Miller, it is the general rule. Phil Donahue, for one, was fired for not observing it. A good reference is Norman Solomon's "War Made Easy -- how presidents and pundits keep spinning us to death".
It goes beyond reporters. The 2008 Democratic Platform includes this: "We will present Iran with a clear choice: if you abandon your nuclear weapons program, support for terror, and threats to Israel, you will receive meaningful incentives; so long as you refuse, the United States and the international community will further ratchet up the pressure, . . ."
Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.