Arianna Catches Miller Out Too

Arianna Huffington: Sorry, Judy... Everybody Didn't Get it Wrong on WMD - Yahoo! News:

"In the Times' Sunday Judy-Culpa, Judy Miller said of her woeful pre-war reporting: 'WMD -- I got it totally wrong... The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them -- we were all wrong.'

To which a growing number of journalists are responding: No, we weren't.

Among them is Joe Lauria, a reporter who has covered the UN since 1990 for a variety of papers, including the London Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, and the Boston Globe. He bridles at Miller's claim. 'I didn't get it wrong,' he told me. 'And a lot of others who covered the lead up to the war didn't get it wrong. Mostly because we weren't just cozying up to Washington sources but had widened our reporting to what we were hearing from people like Mohamed ElBaradei and Hans Blix, and from sources in other countries, like Germany, France, and Russia. Miller had access to these voices, too, but ignored them. Our chief job as journalists is to challenge authority. Because an official says something might make it 'official,' but it doesn't necessarily make it true.'"