New York Sun Editorial: Autophagy of the Times

The sentence highlighted below speaks volumes and provides much needed perspective on the New York Times involvement in Plamegate. From the excellent New York Sun Editorial, Autophagy of the Times:

...Mr. Calame wrote yesterday that Ms. Miller somehow "deprived" Times readers of "a potentially exclusive look into an apparent administration effort to undercut Mr. Wilson and the other critics of the Iraq war. "That is one way of looking at it. But another way, as Ms. Miller pointed out in her article in the October 16 Times, is that since the Times had run Joseph Wilson's original essay, "it had an obligation to explore any allegation that undercut his credibility." For instance, the allegation that his wife worked for the CIA, an agency that was trying to deflect blame to the neoconservatives for whatever its own faults were on Iraq.

Mr. Wilson's claims about Iraq's innocence with respect to Niger and Uranium have in any event since been undercut by both the British Butler commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee. There are some of us who remember the days when there was a New York Times that would not have sat for the CIA trying to overturn decisions of a democratically elected American government, whatever political party was involved...

...Who has been the better journalist - Judith Miller or those attacking her in her own paper's pages? Ms. Miller was sounding the alarm about the Iraqi threat and working her sources and fighting not to get beat. Ms. Dowd was parroting unsubstantiated smears, and Mr. Wilson was falsely downplaying Iraq's effort to obtain weapons of mass destruction, without disclosing to Times readers his wife's institutional interests. And huge numbers of Times reporters have been complaining about her to competing news companies. To which we can only say that if Ms. Miller is to be run out of the Times in favor of Ms. Dowd and Mr. Wilson and those who believe, falsely, that the Iraq war was all just an elaborate con job by Mr. Chalabi and his neoconservative allies - well, then the Times is in even worse straits than we thought.

A must read editorial.

Hat Tip: Power Line