Today the Los Angeles Times takes the New York Times to task for its mishandling of Judy Miller. An editorial in today’s LAT accuses the NYT of “manufacturing a showdown with the government.”

The details of the Miller case (at least those that the paper has made public) reveal not so much a reporter defending a principle as a reporter using a principle to defend herself. There is still no satisfactory explanation, for instance, of why she changed her mind after 85 days in jail and decided to reveal her source.

Personally, I suspect the NY Times is on its way out as “the paper of record.” The Miller episode reveals very questionable standards of journalism, to say the least. And anyone (like a blogger) who routinely checks out stories from several different newspapers probably has noticed that other papers often do a better job. That, and the questionable business decision of putting popular content behind a subscription wall, suggest the Gray Lady is past her prime.

In today’s Salon (behind a subscription wall, naturally), Farhad Manjoo writes that Judy Miller’s unethical actions have created an internal mess at the New York Times that’s “bigger than Jayson Blair.”

On the one hand, it appears that Miller was not the source of Valerie Plame’s identity, as many speculated. However, Manjoo writes,

She protected — and, indeed, still looks to be protecting — people she knew were trying to discredit Wilson, even though they were possibly breaking the law, and even though she seems to have had no legal or ethical basis for doing so.

Judy Miller’s actions had less to do with protecting sources than covering her own butt.

Miller stonewalled the reporting team working on this case. Or, as the paper put it, “Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.” And that’s despite the fact that on Wednesday Judge Thomas Hogan lifted his contempt order, and Miller appears to be in no legal jeopardy in the case.

One Times staffer who spoke to Salon said her relative lack of cooperation with her colleagues is likely to continue to rankle the newsroom, even now that the story has been told. There doesn’t seem to be any sound journalistic reason for her selective silence; as Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor and blogger writes, “What principle of confidentiality extends to ‘interactions with editors?'”

Then there is the unbelievable fact that Miller cannot recall the most key detail in this incident, the source for Plame’s name. Discussions with some at the Times indicated that this would be the hardest pill to swallow for people there: Either Miller is lying, they said, or she’s sloppy to the point of ineffectiveness in her reporting. Neither scenario speaks for her continued employment as a star reporter.

There’s no excuse for any of that. And what were the Times editors thinking? The newspaper sank millions of dollars in Judy’s defense, yet the publishers and editors themselves had no idea what she was up to. And still don’t, apparently.

… it’s unclear why the Times allowed Miller — a reporter whose discredited work on weapons of mass destruction had recently embarrassed the paper — to be put in charge of the Times’ response to investigators looking into the Plame leak. Some revelations are astonishing: Apparently nobody at the newspaper asked to review Miller’s notes in the Plame case before allowing her to defy Fitzgerald, and before the paper’s management made her a high-profile symbol of press freedom in peril.

The Times account shows that senior management did not press Miller on her sources and what the sources had revealed to her about Plame, before backing her stance in public and in numerous editorials. It’s hard to imagine why they didn’t make sure she wasn’t being used by officials in the Bush administration who may have been breaking the law. Then there’s the matter of Miller’s own unethical actions: The Times’ report showed she lied to her editors about her involvement in the case, and maybe more disturbing, she agreed to allow Libby to hide his motives from readers by identifying him in two different ways. Why is she still working at the paper? (Unconfirmed reports say she has taken a leave of absence, but there’s no word of any disciplinary action against her.)

Rem Rieder writes in American Journalism Review:

Most disturbing is the sense that the Times at times is a ship without a skipper, or, better yet, an asylum run by the inmates. Strong leadership and editorial oversight seem hard to come by.

Take the almost casual way the paper decided to put itself at the center of such an important, high-profile legal battle – one that cost the paper millions of dollars and immeasurable credibility and trust. Yet Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Executive Editor Bill Keller didn’t trouble themselves to find out much about Miller’s dealings with her confidential source, I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.

In recent years, Rieder says, the Times has lurched from one debacle to another. In 1999 the Times embarrassed itself by running a series of articles on an alleged espionage ring run by a Los Alamos physicist named Wen Ho Lee. When the case collapsed, the Times said, um, maybe we should have asked better questions. Yeah, maybe. Then the paper helped buttress the Bush Administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, for which it offered a faint apology last year. And then there was Jayson Blair, who got away with plagiarism and fabrication for a remarkably long time.

Arianna Huffington writes that the Times editors should have noticed the flashing warning signs:

We now know that Miller’s bosses were being warned about serious credibility problems with her reporting as far back as 2000 — a warning that came from a Pulitzer Prize-winning colleague of Miller who was so disturbed by her journalistic methods he took the extraordinary step of writing a warning memo to his editors and then asked that his byline not appear on an article they had both worked on.

In today’s WaPo, Howard Kurtz quotes from a December 2000 memo sent by Craig Pyes, a two time Pulitzer winner who had worked with Miller on a series of Times stories on al-Qaeda.

“I’m not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller… I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her. . . . She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies,” and “tried to stampede it into the paper.”

It’s the journalistic equivalent of Dean telling Nixon that Watergate was “a cancer on the presidency.” But while the Times corrected the specific stories Pyes was concerned about, the paper, like Nixon, ignored the long-term diagnosis. And, of course, the very same issues Pyes raised in 2000 — Miller’s questionable judgment, her advocacy, her willingness to take dictation from government sources — were the ones that reappeared in Miller’s pre-war “reporting” on Saddam’s WMD.

I think the Times management, from chairman Arthur Sulzberger on down, needs to think real hard about what it is a newspaper is for. One incident of compromised reporting might be forgiven, but the Times has developed a pattern. It may not be too late for the Times to mend its reputation, but it had better start doing so now. Else we’re going to be calling it the Gray Disreputable Woman.