Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller is back in the news. Last month, it was revealed she had started writing for the right-wing website NewsMax. And on Sunday, she appeared on Fox News and criticized WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Judith Miller: “Julian Assange may be a bad journalist, but he is a journalist.”
Question: “Why is he a bad journalist?”
Judith Miller: “Because he didn’t care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out, or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone.”
While at the New York Times, Judith Miller was often criticized for not verifying her own stories. She wrote several of the key articles that claimed Iraq had an extensive weapons of mass destruction program ahead of the Iraq invasion. Miller once said, “[M]y job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of the New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”