Ive been mulling over

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I’ve been mulling over the New York Times dimension of the Plame story for the last day or so. And one thing seems more and more clear to me. This isn’t a judgment made on particular reporting, more a sense or just intuition. So let me just briefly share it with you.

I think there’s a whole part of the Times’ story that we’re not yet aware of. Let me try an analogy. If my memory is correct, when astronomers plot the location of black holes in space, they can’t see them directly. It’s impossible. No light escapes from them; so there’s nothing to see. You can tell where they are by plotting the effects of their gravitational pull on nearby stars and celestial bodies.

There’s something similar happening here.

When you read the Times Sunday article plus Miller’s apologia, there’s too much there that is simply inexplicable in terms of what we already know. Going into this mess Miller’s reputation was already severely checkered and her journalistic judgment very much in question. And yet Sulzberger and Keller (the first in the van, the second following with an odd passivity) staked the reputation of the Times itself on her and went along for this whole ride without even getting the most basic information from her about what had happened?

Simple poor judgment doesn’t explain that for me. Something else is up.

Now, I know it seems like I’m hinting ominously about some deep dark secret. Really, I have no idea what it is. But there’s a whole piece to this puzzle, probably the most telling one, that we haven’t yet seen.

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