One of the most infamous media cheerleaders of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Judith Miller, derided young journalists Friday for failing to critically cover the rise of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
During a Fox News discussion of a New York Times magazine profile of Ben Rhodes, a senior White House adviser, Miller heartily agreed with a quote from Rhodes about how the young political reporters the White House press shop deals with “literally know nothing.”
“There’s an amazing line in the Ben Rhodes piece in which he says the average person we talk to, the reporters, are 27 years old and they know nothing, they know nothing!” she said with a laugh.
Miller also said Trump is the “natural extension” of failures in our political system at large, and the failure of the media “to ask questions.”
In the piece, Rhodes, an architect of the Obama administration’s campaign to sell the Iran nuclear deal, says that job was made easier by the fact that few news organizations have the resources to fact-check their claims.
Miller said Rhodes’ warning about the media being asleep at the wheel is particularly pertinent in 2016, saying, “We’ve seen this happen again and again.”
“His warning is, what happens when the next person tries to do this and tries to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to sell something that is not in the nation’s interest?” she said. “Where are the media? Where are the reporters? They are not there and I can’t say I disagree with him. I don’t.”
Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist-turned-Fox News contributor, fell from grace as a top New York Times reporter in Washington after her extensive coverage of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program was found to be based on faulty intelligence. Her reporting was cited by Republicans making the case for the Iraq War.
