Judith Miller is off the New York Times

It has been long predicted, but the odd part is that it took this long. From what I understood, there would be serious issues if she were ever given a key beat again. And also there have been issues raised about the lack of transparency within the Times about how it handled her case, and the documentation of her reporting.

The part of that whole mess that stuck with me related to how the Times was criticized for apparent "dishonesty" in how it reported the story, an issue of journalistic credibility with what is considered the U.S. paper of record, YET if the Times's response is compared to any other corporate response to a PR black eye, the Times clearly WAS behaving exactly how other corporations behave in such instances.

So the key question remains: Should the Times cover itself with the same journalistic standards it applies to other stories, or should it act with corporate best interests (obfuscation) as a priority, PR 101?

And what does it mean for a corporation whose "widget" is shining light on things when it engages in the activity of keeping things in the dark?

To try and force some sort of industrial analogy, we might say, well, how is that different from tobacco companies being forced to persuade people not to smoke?

Or perhaps this one: what would it mean if a big automobile company started dismantling the highways around its major factories?

Analogies never work when you carry them too far. And besides, corporations contradicting their own central missions isn't that rare of a phenomenon, when you think about it, from BP promoting solar power and conservation, to Apple computer, a victim of a reductive and monopolitistic Windoze computing monoculture, engaging in lockstep monopoly lockouts with its own proprietary standards.

But when it comes to self-proclaimed "truth-tellers," we simply cut them far less slack than we do other businesses who swim in a far murkier information "soup" where deception and half-truths are assumed as the default position, rather than the other way around.

Here's a bit from the AP take on this story:

Link: Report: Miller, 'NY Times' Close in on Separation Agreement.

NYT's Judith Miller Retires

NEW YORK, Nov. 9, 2005

(AP) Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who was first lionized, then vilified by her own newspaper for her role in the CIA leak case, has retired from the Times, the paper announced Wednesday.

Miller, who joined the Times in 1977 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for reporting on global terrorism, had been negotiating with the paper for several weeks about her future.

She spent 85 days in jail over the summer for refusing to testify about her conversations with a confidential source. But after her release, Miller was criticized harshly and publicly by Times editors and writers for her actions in the CIA leak case and for her reporting during the run-up to the Iraq war, later discredited, indicating that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Miller did not immediately respond to an e-mail or answer her telephone.

"We are grateful to Judy for her significant personal sacrifice to defend an important journalistic principle," said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, in a statement. "I respect her decision to retire from The Times and wish her well."

Executive editor Bill Keller, who was critical of Miller's actions, said of his newly departed reporter, "She displayed fierce determination and personal courage both in pursuit of the news and in resisting assaults on the freedom of news organizations to report."

In an e-mail memo last month to the newspaper's staff, Keller said that until Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald subpoenaed Miller in the criminal probe, "I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end" of leaks aimed at Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson.

"Judy seems to have misled" Times Washington bureau chief Bill Taubman about the extent of her involvement, Keller wrote.

Taubman asked Miller in the fall of 2003 whether she was among the reporters who had gotten leaks about the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

"Ms. Miller denied it," the newspaper reported in a weekend story.

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