Judith Miller (journalist)

Judith Miller (born January 2, 1948) is an American journalist and commentator known for her coverage of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program both before and after the 2003 invasion, which was later discovered to have been based on inaccurate information from the intelligence community. She worked in ''The New York Times'' Washington bureau before joining Fox News in 2008.

Miller co-wrote a book '' Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War'', which became a top ''New York Times'' best seller shortly after she became a victim of a hoax anthrax letter at the time of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

''The New York Times'' determined that several stories she wrote about Iraq were inaccurate, and she was forced to resign from the paper in 2005. According to commentator Ken Silverstein, Miller's Iraq reporting "effectively ended her career as a respectable journalist". Miller defended her reporting, stating "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of ''The New York Times'' what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." She published a memoir, ''The Story: A Reporter's Journey'', in April 2015.

Miller was involved in the Plame Affair, where Valerie Plame was outed as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spy by Richard Armitage after her husband published a ''New York Times'' op-ed casting doubts on claims that Saddam Hussein sought to purchase uranium from Africa. Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to reveal that her source in the Plame Affair was Scooter Libby. Later, she contributed to the conservative Fox News Channel and '' Newsmax'', and was a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Alex Pareene (Dec. 30, 2010
"Judith Miller: From the Times to the nuts"
''Salon''.

Early life and education

Miller was born in New York City. Her Russian-born father, Bill Miller, was Jewish. He owned the ''Riviera'' night club in New Jersey and later operated several casinos in Las Vegas.
Bill Miller was known for booking iconic Las Vegas performers. His biggest success was getting Elvis Presley to return to Las Vegas after initially being an unsuccessful booking. Her mother was a "pretty Irish Catholic showgirl."

Miller attended Ohio State University, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. She graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1969 and received a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs. Early in her career at ''The New York Times'' bureau in Washington, D.C. she dated one of the newspaper's other reporters (and future investment banker) Steven Rattner. In 1993, she married Jason Epstein, an editor and publisher.

Judith Miller is the half-sister of Jimmy Miller who was a record producer for many classic rock bands of the 1960s through to the 1990s including the Rolling Stones, Traffic and Cream.

Career

During Miller's tenure at ''The New York Times'', she was a member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, for its 2001 coverage of global terrorism before and after the September 11 attacks. She and James Risen received the award and one of the cited articles appeared under her byline.

Her writing during this period was criticised by Middle-east scholar Edward Said for evincing an anti-Islamic bias. In his book '' Covering Islam'' Said stated that Miller's book ''God Has Ninety-Nine Names'' "is like a textbook of the inadequacies and distortions of media coverage of Islam." He criticised her poor grasp of Arabic, saying that "nearly every time she tries to impress us with her ability to say a phrase or two in Arabic she unerringly gets it wrong... They are the crude mistakes committed by a foreigner who neither has care nor... respect for her subject." He concluded Miller

fears and dislikes Lebanon, hates Syria, laughs at Libya, dismisses Sudan, feels sorry for and a little alarmed by Egypt and is repulsed by Saudi Arabia. She hasn't bothered to learn the language and is relentlessly only concerned with the dangers of Islamic militancy, which, I would hazard a guess, accounts for less than 5 percent of the billion-strong Islamic world.

However, Miller asserted that in the wake of the September 11 attacks she argued that militant Islamism of the type represented by Al Qaeda had peaked and was fading into insignificance.

Anthrax hoax victim

On October 12, 2001, Miller opened an anthrax hoax letter mailed to her ''New York Times'' office. The 2001 anthrax attacks had begun occurring in the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001, with anthrax-laced letters sent to ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and the ''New York Post'', all in New York City, as well as the ''National Enquirer'' in Boca Raton, Florida. Two additional letters (with a higher grade of anthrax) were sent on October 9, 2001, to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy in Washington.

Miller was the only major U.S. media reporter, and ''The New York Times'' the only major U.S. media organization, to be victimized by a fake anthrax letter in the fall of 2001. Miller had reported extensively on the subject of biological threats and had co-authored, with Stephen Engelberg and William Broad