Judith Miller has her share of detractors in the news business, but almost everyone who takes notes for a living is rooting for her now.
The New York Times reporter, along with Time magazine's Matt Cooper, is facing a stretch behind bars for refusing to testify about confidential sources -- a prospect that came a step closer Tuesday when a federal appeals court upheld a contempt ruling against them in the Valerie Plame leak investigation.
 
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"It's an amazing twist in her career," said Michael Massing, a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review who has criticized Miller's reporting on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. "At a time when she was being held up to such scrutiny for her writing on Iraq, she now is being cast in the role of journalistic martyr. I think it's horrendous that she could go to jail, regardless of whatever journalistic shortcomings she's been guilty of."
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, agreed. "This has rehabilitated her image a bit," she said. "Even within the ranks of the New York Times, there was an enormous amount of controversy about her. Now this comes along, and almost everyone can agree she doesn't deserve to go to jail over this, even if she's made mistakes in the past and not been skeptical enough in the past. She's doing the right thing in this case."
Miller, 57, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent and co-author of a best-selling book on bioterrorism, declined to be interviewed. But she told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday that "one of the Orwellian aspects of this entire affair" is that she never wrote a story about Plame, the CIA operative whose name was leaked by senior administration officials to columnist Robert Novak. A special prosecutor in the case demanded that Miller and Cooper talk about their sources; Novak declined again yesterday to say whether he has been subpoenaed to testify.
"I have to be willing to go to prison," Miller told CNN. "I think the principles at stake in this case are so important to the functioning of a free press and to the confidentiality of sources that I just have to be willing to do that."
Still, anyone who thinks the process is a ticket to fame and fortune need only ask Vanessa Leggett. A Texas freelance writer who refused to turn over tapes of her interviews for a book on a homicide case, Leggett spent more than five months, until January 2002, in a cell the size of a walk-in closet.
"Every time a reporter would interview me in jail and say, 'Isn't this great?,' you'd look at them like they were completely lost," Leggett said. "The worst thing was the loss of privacy. Every move you make is monitored and essentially dictated by the federal government."
Whether to testify was "the most difficult and the most simple decision I've ever had to make," Leggett said. "I knew in my heart I really didn't have a choice, but I really didn't want to go to jail." She was freed when the grand jury disbanded.
Cooper, 42, said yesterday: "You'd have to be catatonic not to be unsettled by the prospect of a jail sentence. Great career move? I had a pretty good career already.
"I suppose in a society that values celebrity and fame there's a certain notoriety that comes with cases like this. But there are easier ways to get ahead in life. I wouldn't really wish this on anyone."
People following the case say Miller, beginning with a "Today" appearance with Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. in October, has been more aggressive than Cooper in seizing the media spotlight. But that also reflects a difference in their institutions. The Times has gone on the offensive against the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, and published four editorials on the subject; Time has not mentioned the case in its pages.
Miller was embedded with a U.S. military unit searching for WMDs in Iraq in 2003 and, according to several military officers, acted as a middleman between the unit and Ahmed Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile who was then close to the Bush administration and claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed illegal weapons. She told a Times colleague in an e-mail that Chalabi had "provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper." Some of Miller's optimistic stories about the WMD search were cited last year in a Times editor's note acknowledging flaws in the paper's coverage, and in a stinging column by ombudsman Daniel Okrent.
At the time, Executive Editor Bill Keller called Miller "a smart, well-sourced, industrious and fearless reporter."
