| Page 3 of 5 < > |
The Reporter's Last Take
Judy Miller resigned from the New York Times yesterday, after months of criticism -- external and internal -- over her role in the CIA leak.
(Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
That had been Miller's main mission throughout her journalism career.
Her style is indeed "pushy," as she herself suggested. But would an aggressive, high-decibel male reporter be embroiled in all the controversy in which Miller finds herself? It is a question that some of her friends raise, for they believe that part of the invective swirling around Miller has to do with gender bias.
"A man is tough and hard-driving and a woman is a bitch," says Patricia Cohen, the Times theater editor (and former Washington Post staffer), who is a friend of Miller's.
Others say that Miller's troubles at the Times stemmed in part from poor management decisions about assignments.
For instance, Miller was promoted in the late 1980s to an editing job as deputy Washington bureau chief. And it was a disaster. She ran roughshod over staff so harshly that Max Frankel, then the paper's executive editor, said he "relieved her of that job."
"She was very anxiety-ridden and tough on a lot of people," he says.
(Miller concurs that the promotion was a mistake. "I was ill-suited for it. It's not me. I'm not good at managing other people.")
Frankel said Miller flourished, however, as the Times Cairo bureau chief and then a Paris correspondent.
"Judy made her early reputation as a reporter in the Middle East, where you don't work with many people," Frankel says. "You're out alone. You're running a bureau and you're traveling around and you're getting good interviews and lobbing good stories. And she was appreciated for those things."
Indeed, Miller had a large footprint throughout the Middle East in those years. She was on a first-name basis, for instance, with the late King Hussein of Jordan and once ended up in a tractor alone with Moammar Gaddafi of Libya at the wheel as she attempted to interview him.
Colleagues in the region recall her as hypercompetitive, sometimes disturbingly so.
Youssef M. Ibrahim, who was Middle East regional correspondent for the Times for 10 years beginning in 1986, says Miller tried to steal an interview he'd scheduled in the mid-1980s with Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Egyptian foreign ministry official who would later become United Nations secretary general.
