Reporters letting themselves be tools of partisan dirty tricks

Now that the evidence is building that the Plame outing was a political dirty trick from one of the top White House aid, should we really be sorry for jailed reporter Judith Miller? Is she really being so righteous in protecting her sources? She knew Karl Rove was using her to discredit an outspoken critic of the Administration's claims on iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Judith Miller was one of the Bush Administration's favorite reporters over the time it was trying to sell a second iraq war to the American people. She never heard an iraqi tall tale that she didn't believe and she frequently regurgitated the outlandish stories not only of White House insiders like Karl Rove but also shady iraqi exiles like Ahmed Chalabi.

Was Judith Miller really so naive? Or was she consciously engaged in selling the war to New York Times readers? Was she being partisan herself? We expect a certain amount of objectivity and critical thinking in the pieces from a paper of the stature of the New York Times but we rarely saw that in Judith Miller's reporting. At what point does a reporter become the mouthpiece of policiticans?

Howard Kurtz at the post compares current events to Watergate:

Unlike Deep Throat, who was risking his FBI career by telling Woodward about the Nixon spying operation and cover-upRove and whoever else leaked Valerie Plame's CIA connection to Novak and other journalists were doing partisan dirty work, and some may have been committing a crime. Cooper and others have argued that they can't make a distinction between "good guy" and "bad guy" sources -- a promise is a promise -- but helping White House officials finger a covert operative is not exactly the kind of work that builds public support for the Fourth Estate.