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Friday, July 22, 2005

Preparing?

Look at the first part of the 2nd sentence in Steve Clemons's post excerpted below:
The source did not have any knowledge on whether Bolton was one of Miller's sources on the Valerie Plame story she was preparing [emphasis mine]
I've followed this scandal pretty obsessively, and this is the first time I've heard anyone say for sure that Miller was preparing a story -- as opposed to doing reporting in case she wanted to write one.

For a long time, Miller's non-story has struck me as a potentially key question: why didn't she write a story given that she was evidently doing relevant reporting? A friend in the MSM business has suggested it's possible that Miller (or her editors) just decided there wasn't anything extra there. I don't know if I buy that. An alternative is that Miller was going to break the story, only to be stymied by Novak's scoop. But still -- why not write an article when you've done reporting and supposedly know some key stuff?

It's possible Steve Clemons inserted that phrase himself, but I wonder if his "highly placed" source knows something else that we don't know.

2 Comments:

Blogger The Duke said...

Once Novak broke the story, it's unlikely her editors were willing to run her angle unless she had something compelling and different. I've been involved with numerous stories that got killed by an editor -- over the reporter's objection -- in just such a circumstance.

The Duke

7/23/2005 12:06 AM  
Blogger Jonah B. Gelbach said...

very interesting.

thanks for the update -- that is helpful to know.

keep us posted here at ccm....

7/24/2005 1:45 PM  

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