High Noon on West 43rd Street

What the NYT is going through now reminds me of an earlier crisis.

On April 29, 2003, I broke the story of how Jayson Blair had apparently plagiarized the story of a mother whose son was killed in Iraq from a San Antonio newspaper. Blair quit a couple of days later, which the Times reported in a short story (and editor's note), as did I.

For more than a week, as I published several more examples of how the young reporter had ripped off other people's work, had not spoken to people he claimed to have interviewed and not shown up in cities he claimed to be in, the Times wrote nothing, and Howell Raines said little. Then, on May 11, the Times published an exhaustive, 6,400-word examination of Blair's lies, and no one remembers the earlier delay.

Now I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, comparing the deliberate and twisted fabrications of Blair to the controversy surrounding Judy Miller. The Times has covered the basic developments in her legal case, and Bill Keller, unlike Howell, understands the value of talking to the press. But the paper is under enormous pressure to make a full accounting of the matter. If it does so in the coming days, and that account is deemed credible, the less than aggressive coverage of recent weeks will be forgotten. And that, at the moment, is what everyone is waiting to see.

Here's my report on where we are:

The anguish among New York Times staffers over the paper's handling of the Judith Miller saga has mounted in recent days, much to the consternation of its top executives.

"Of course I'm concerned by the very palpable frustration in the newsroom," Executive Editor Bill Keller said yesterday. "I share it. It's excruciating to have a story and not be able to tell it, and annoying to be nibbled at by the blogs and to watch preposterous speculation congeal into conventional wisdom."

As Miller, who served 85 days in jail in the CIA leak case, finished her grand jury testimony yesterday, she returns to a newspaper that has been torn by anger and confusion, not just over her conduct and dealings with Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, but over the way the paper has handled a story in which it has played a central role.

"A lot of the reporters have really been wondering and doubting their editors," said Adam Clymer, a former Times political editor and chief Washington correspondent. "It wasn't that they knew the defense of Judy was wrong, but they didn't have a sense of what was being defended. . . . People all over the paper think the Times should have been covering the story harder."

George Freeman, the Times Co.'s assistant general counsel, met with the Washington bureau last week to address staff complaints. "There was so much rumor and untruth and speculation going around," Freeman said. "I wouldn't characterize it as people being unhappy. People had a lot of questions and concerns. I hope to some degree I assuaged the concerns."

The Times has a team of journalists working on a major piece on the subject, under the supervision of Deputy Managing Editor Jonathan Landman, but has maintained it was impossible to publish such an article until Miller no longer faced legal liability from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and could cooperate with the paper's reporters. That stance -- challenged by critics who note there is no legal bar to a witness discussing her own grand jury testimony -- has left a vacuum.

"Within the Times, there's a great deal of concern about how this is going to reflect on the Times as an institution and therefore on them," said Alex Jones, a former Times reporter and now a Harvard media analyst. "Everybody wants a clean breast." He said of the editors: "Why they decided they could not speak, I really do not understand."