Jon Stewart finally interviews the disgraced New York Times reporter Judith Miller the way she needs to be interviewed.

Click image to play extended interview.

I watched this last night standing on my feet.

That's how excited I was to see somebody finally, at long last, holding Miller's feet to the fire.

I had already watched several interviews which had me yelling at the screen in anger, and here was one that had me yelling at the screen in support.

Here is more from the Daily Beast:  

Stewart did not let Miller off easy, claiming that Miller partook in a “concerted effort” to lead us into a war with Iraq. 

“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,” Stewart said. “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.” 

Much of the focus of their on-air tussle was Miller’s front-page Times story from September 8, 2002, headlined, “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts.” In it, Miller and her Times colleague Michael R. Gordon cited anonymous officials from the Bush administration who believed that Iraq had “stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb.” 

Here is part of their heated exchange:

MILLER: “Jon, were we not supposed to report what it was that had the intelligence community so nervous about Saddam?” 

STEWART: “No. You should have reported it, though, in the context of this administration was very clearly pushing a narrative, and by losing sight of that context, by not reporting—” 

MILLER: “I think we did.” 

STEWART: “I wholeheartedly disagree with you.” 

MILLER: “That’s what makes journalism.” 

STEWART: “It’s actually not what makes journalism...”

At one point in the interview Miller claims that a statement by David Albright, an expert she claims she trusted on nuclear weapons, which disagreed with the White House about Iraq's ability to build that type of weapon, was cut due to space. Which is one of the most bullshit answers I have ever heard in my life.

Usually at the end of an interview,  even with somebody that Stewart disagrees with wholeheartedly, he is always magnanimous and makes a joke and shakes their hand to signify no hard feelings.

But not this time.

At the end of this interview Stewart looks disgusted with the fact that Miller will not take responsibility for her biased reporting, and expresses how deeply sad that makes him.

Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller upset that the media keeps wanting to "beat up on who was responsible for the Iraq War." Yes, how unreasonable of them.

Courtesy of Media Matters:

 ON SCOTT: There has been Iraq fatigue among the public in this country for a long time. What about the media? 

 JUDITH MILLER: Not the media. Not so, because the media still loves to beat up on who was responsible for the Iraq War, and who is to blame for the current controversy, the current crisis, and that is not helpful, Jon. What we should be doing, what the media should be doing, is encouraging everyone who has a view of what to do now in Iraq to come forward and to discuss it rationally. But they're doing the opposite. They're trying to shut down people like Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, all of the, quote, "neo-conservatives," who brought us this war. It's not helpful.

You know usually I would be shocked that a so-called reporter would say something like this out loud.  But this is Judith "They're using aluminum tubes to make atomic weapons in Iraq" Miller.

She was one of the "journalists" who helped the Bush Administration sell the war to America, and she has almost as muhc blood on her hands as Dick Cheney and George Bush.

Here is what Salon wrote about her in 2005: 

Miller was a consistent critic of Saddam’s regime, but before 1998 she was capable of making nuanced judgments about the problem it posed for the United States. At some point after that, she apparently began to believe that she, with her prescient expertise about WMD and radical Islam, and her hawkish and neocon sources were right. This was when her fateful decline began. A minor scientist and sometime college teacher such as Khidhir Hamza became “the highest ranking scientist” to defect from Iraq. She relayed complaints from Gucci revolutionaries like Chalabi that they had been left out of the loop by the Clinton administration, and retailed Iraq National Congress tall tales to her unsuspecting audience. By the late 1990s, she had laid the ground for her subsequent path, of becoming stenographer to a motley crew of neoconservative hawks and Iraqi expatriate wheelers and dealers. The aluminum tubes story, in particular, which she co-wrote and which helped pave the way to war, will likely be taught in journalism classes for years as a textbook study of flawed reporting. In the end, Miller’s decline seems due more to professional ambition than ideological conviction — although her own beliefs clearly grew closer to the neocons’. 

“While Miller might not have intended to march in lockstep with these hawks, she was caught up in an almost irresistible cycle,” Foer writes. “Because she kept printing the neocon party line, the neocons kept coming to her with huge stories and great quotes, constantly expanding her access.” 

In the end, it seems that Miller will go down in history not so much as a true believer as a useful idiot.

I think "useful idiot" might be the kindest thing that can be said about Judith Miller. 

In fact her reporting was so bad, that the New York Times had to officially apologize for it in 2004.

And of course she could not be more wrong about what a reporter's job is concerning Iraq, and what happens going forward.