Miller No Stranger to Being Part of a Story

Judith Miller of the New York Times is a reporter acclaimed for outsize ambitions, achievements and failings, a groundbreaking journalist whose work has won over leaders half a world away while sometimes alienating colleagues in her own newsroom.

By going to jail Wednesday for refusing to divulge the identity of her confidential sources, Miller finds herself in a not unfamiliar position -- with her reporting as much a subject of discussion as the story she was chasing.

In fact, the 57-year-old Miller earned her contempt citation and jail sentence merely for speaking to government officials about CIA operative Valerie Plame and declining to tell a court who those officials were. She never wrote a story about Plame and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, the former diplomat who attempted to debunk a Bush administration claim about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The daughter of a nightclub owner and music impresario, Miller went to the Middle East while studying for a master’s degree in public affairs at Princeton. She found that her natural curiosity transferred easily to reporting assignments with National Public Radio and other media.

Being a woman might have seemed a handicap working amid sexist Arab governments. But as the New York Times’ Cairo bureau chief, Miller was able to ingratiate herself with leaders in the region to produce exclusives that often bested her male colleagues’ reporting. She was on a first-name basis with such leaders at the time as Jordan’s King Hussein and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Miller’s early reporting on the threat of Al Qaeda and its attempts to secure weapons of mass destruction was part of a package that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002. A book about bio-terrorism she co-wrote, “Germs,” came out shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. That made Miller an even more popular figure on television talk shows.

Some colleagues praised her seemingly limitless sources and doggedness. But others worried that she would go off half-cocked, ready to regurgitate the latest reports from her sources without corroboration.

That fear leapt to the fore in the wake of the war in Iraq, when the New York Times acknowledged in an unusual editor’s note that it had failed to view claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction with sufficient skepticism. The paper noted that its reporting had relied too heavily on Ahmad Chalabi, a former Pentagon favorite whose prewar intelligence reports have been widely discredited, and others intent on bringing down Saddam Hussein’s regime. Miller wrote many of those stories.

On Wednesday, a number of journalism organizations praised Miller and said her sacrifice proved the need for a federal law allowing reporters to protect their sources. Other commentators said her stand for the 1st Amendment was a diversion, with one claiming that her real legacy was being duped by “one of the biggest hucksters of modern times, Ahmad Chalabi.”