Video: Jon Stewart tears into Judith Miller over Iraq reporting

By Michelle Coffey

Former New York Times journalist Judith Miller found herself in the hot seat on “The Daily Show” as Jon Stewart ripped apart her reporting of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, a narrative that would help fuel momentum for war.

“I believe that you helped the administration take us to the most devastating mistake in foreign policy that we’ve made in, like, 100 years,” Stewart said Wednesday evening, adding, “but you seem lovely.”

In 2002, the New York Times ran a front-page story co-written by Miller aboutSaddam Hussein stepping up his pursuit of atomic-bomb parts. Key figures in the Bush administration such as Donald Rumsfeld would go on to cite the report as proof that Hussein posed an immediate danger, further supporting the case for war.

Miller, whose reporting was later discredited, defended herself, citing faulty intelligence sources and saying she wasn’t alone.

“The intelligent sources we were talking to had never been wrong before,” Miller said. “The information came from the men and women who had steered me right on al Qaeda and 9/11.”

Stewart fired back during the heated back-and-forth exchange:

“I think it was a concerted effort to take us into war in Iraq. You had to shift, with energy, the focus of America from Afghanistan and al Qaeda to Iraq. That took effort. Somebody pointed the light at Iraq, and that somebody is the White House, and the Defense Department, and Rumsfeld. He said right after 9/11, ‘Find me a pretext to go to war with Iraq.’ That’s from the 9/11 papers and the study.”

When asked whether she felt she had been manipulated, Miller responded, “all journalists are manipulated and all politicians lie.”

Post-9/11 media mistakes

One media expert believes that Miller has become the scapegoat for all negligent reporting on Iraq, but that some of the blame is justified.

“Jon Stewart did his homework and really took it apart,” said Judy Muller, associate professor at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. However, she says, Miller is not solely responsible for the media’s faulty coverage of Iraq.

“A lot of news outlets followed the New York Times and got it wrong,” she said. “They didn’t vet, and we went to war and it cost us lives and trillions of dollars. Post 9/11, news outlets weren’t skeptical enough. They didn’t question the government as hard as they should about the Patriot Act and weapons of mass destruction out of fear of being labeled unpatriotic.”

Muller believes it was a mistake for Miller to not show any remorse during the interview while promoting a book designed to rehabilitate her image.

“She should have said, ‘I got taken and I wasn’t skeptical enough, and I’m angry,’” Muller said. “You need to show the viewer that you learned something.”

Miller’s new book is “The Story,” described by her publisher as her own look at the reporting by herself and others about Iraq and whether Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It’s also about “the real life of a foreign and investigative reporter. It is an adventure story, told with bluntness and wryness.”

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/video-jon-stewart-tears-into-judith-miller-over-iraq-reporting-2015-04-30