NewsBusters readers should remember Judith Miller as the New York Times reporter that was jailed for 85 days in 2005 for refusing to reveal to a federal grand jury information related to the Valerie Plame affair.

Having resigned from the Times in November 2005, Miller is now an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. On Monday, she spoke to WOR radio's Steve Malzberg about first amendment issues related to the press.

In particular, she discussed her views concerning some rather controversial reports that have been published including Dana Priest's foreign prisons piece as well as the NYT's revelations regarding terrorist surveillance (audio link below the fold).

After no huge caches of weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, the New York Times felt burnt by liberal accusations of being water-carriers for Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war -- an accusation based almost entirely on a handful of overly credulous pieces filed by former reporter Judith Miller.

These days, the Times is leaning heavily in the opposite direction, preening about how skeptical it has been about U.S. government evidence demonstrating Iran's role in providing bombs to Shiite militias in Iraq. Monday's headline makes that clear and the front-page story itself by James Glanz and Richard Oppel Jr. is hedged to the hilt: "U.S. Says Raid in Iraq Supports Claim on Iran, but Doubts Persist."

The story hasn't been on the media radar much of late, but the legal team of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former Bush admin official at the center of the Valerie Plame Wilson leak investigation, came out swinging this week, landing a number of blows against reporters and news organizations in a court filing defending Libby's desire to compel them to submit evidence he deems essential to his defense.

After the Libby team began poking holes in the stories of journalists Tim Russert, Judith Miller, and Matt Cooper and others, the press hasn't been especially interested in following the story. There are a few blogs doing a good job of chronicling the battle between Libby and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. One such blog is JustOneMinute, which has provided a PDF version (and some cogent analysis) of Libby's most recent filing in two parts, here and here.

The American Thinker has a great summary of the filing by attorney Clarice Feldman:

We have just been granted a window on the struggle between Lewis “Scooter” Libby and the elite media over his access to their internal documents. Libby is charged with federal crimes because his versions of conversations with reporters differ from the accounts of the media people. He seeks evidence from their files about what they knew and what they privately wrote at the time. In a “he said/she said” confrontation, access to supporting evidence becomes critical to the ability to mount a defense.

Washington Post columnist (and former Post reporter) David Ignatius concludes his year in review by endorsing the notion that liberal reporters ought to stick by their biases and passions. Don't be afraid to be liberal, and don't try to please everyone (conservatives):

It was a bad year, finally, for the people who are paid to make sense of things -- the unhumble and increasingly unloved scribes in my business. Newspaper circulation was plummeting, network television lost its anchors, literally and figuratively, and new media seemed to be feeding on popular anger at the Mainstream Media and its claims of impartiality.

At the center of some of the year's biggest stories stood the media themselves -- trying to balance codes of professional ethics against demands of citizenship. The New York Times lionized Judith Miller for going to jail to protect her sources from a grand jury investigation, but when her key source turned out to be Vice President Cheney's top aide, the cheering stopped and Miller lost her job. Top editors of the Times and The Post tried to act responsibly by discussing explosive intelligence stories with the White House before publication, and then they were vilified by the left for publishing too little and by the right for publishing anything at all.

The current issue of the New York Observer includes Gabriel Sherman's report on the back-and-forth at the New York Times regarding the paper's NSA-wiretap story.

Highlights from Sherman's piece:

...Multiple Times sources said that the story had come up more than a year ago—specifically, before the 2004 election. After The Times decided not to publish it at that time, Mr. Risen went away on book leave, and his piece was shelved and regarded as dead, according to a Times source.

Conservatives are rolling their eyes watching the political left’s outrage over the Valerie Plame identity controversy, wondering when it was exactly that liberals suddenly became the super patriots defending the virtues of the CIA. For a half-century the American political left has done everything in its power to undermine the national security of this country. Now we are to believe, as they wring their hands in agony and outrage – outrage, I say! – over Ms. Plame’s outing, that they…care? This goes beyond rank hypocrisy. It is intellectual dishonesty.

Let’s visit the left’s record on national security matters. History is not kind. Where was the left when the Rosenbergs, communists both, fed our nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union? Both were deep-fried for the treason they’d committed. Liberals tut-tutted then and tut-tut now, and don’t tell me there aren’t hardened leftists who favored giving nuclear weapons to the Soviets to thwart what they considered America’s imperial ambitions. What of Alger Hiss, another Soviet spy who also committed treason against his country? To this day he remains a darling of the political left. Up until the moment he died he was the left’s poster child for American national security oppression.

The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders has produced its annual World Press Freedom Index for 2005.

The Associated Press reports that "European countries lead the world in providing freedoms to news media, while the United States lost ground."

North Korea retained the last spot, 167, and the U.S. fell to 44.

"The United States dropped more than 20 spots, to 44th place, mainly because of the imprisonment of New York Times reporter Judith Miller and judicial action that was 'undermining the privacy of journalistic sources,' the statement said."

The top five countries: Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, Norway.

Other countries that ranked higher than the U.S.: Canada, France, South Korea, Italy

Beginning in the Middle Ages, there was a widely popular puppet show called “Punch and Judy.” Most of its content and humor were based on two characters flailing away at each other with slap sticks. Today, we have a verbal equivalent of the same thing, occurring in the pages of the New York Times. These protagonists are Arthur (“Pinch”) Sulzberger Jr., boy-publisher of the Times, and Judith (“Judy”) Miller, one-time rising star writer for that paper.

Judy says she told the truth and upheld the values of the Times. Slap! Pinch says she misled her editors and brought the reputation of the Times into question. Slap! Slap! But unlike its medieval ancestor, the Pinch and Judy Show has four participants. And they are not evenly matched.

Over at the letters page of Romenesko, former New York Times U.N. Bureau Chief Barbara Crossette complains about the conservative, anti-Kofi Annan agenda of Judith Miller:

Over the last year or so, Judith Miller also wrote a series of damaging reports on the "oil for food" scandal at the United Nations -- in particular, personally damaging to Secretary General Kofi Annan because the reports were frequently based on half-truths or hearsay peddled on Capitol Hill by people determined to force Annan out of office. At the UN, this was interpreted as payback for the UN's refusal to back the US war in Iraq. As a former NYT UN bureau chief [now retired] I have been asked repeatedly by diplomats, former US government officials, journalists still reporting from the organization and others why Times editors did not step in to question some of this reporting -- a lot of it proved wrong by the recent report by Paul Volcker -- or why the paper seemed to be on a vendetta against the UN. The Times answered that question Sunday in its page one report on the Miller affair. Ms. Run Amok had at least one very highly placed friend at the paper, and many Timespeople were afraid to tangle with her because of that.

Judith Miller denies she went to jail as a "career move."

"I did not go to jail to get a large advance on my next book contract or to martyr myself. Anyone who thinks that I would spend 85 days in jail as a canny career move, or simply because I misunderstood communication, or a lack of such from my source, knows nothing about jail, nothing about me and nothing about the admittedly complicated facts in this case."

Miller is surprised at the skepticism she now faces from fellow journalists. She enjoyed blanket support from her colleagues until more facts from the case began to emerge, including her claim that she didn't recall who it was who gave her the name Valerie "Flame."

The Society of Professional Journalists gave her their First Amendment award in Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Review Journal noted the reaction she got: