In “When Judy Met Kim,” investigative comedian Mo Rocca takes us inside the prison where Judith Miller serves time, revealing for the first time that the New York Times reporter shares a cell with rapper and hip-hop artist Lil’ Kim.
Update [2005-7-19 10:44:14 by susanhu]: Not only that, E&P has learned that prison food doesn’t agree with Judy’s tummy! More on that below the fold.
You all know that Miller was jailed for refusing to name a source. Lil’ Kim was jailed “for lying to a grand jury about her knowledge of a shooting incident outside a Manhattan radio station,” reports Rocca.
Read Rocca’s exclusive transcript of their meeting, their conversations, the danger both women face when Judy “has been watching her favorite TV show, CNN’s Newsnight with Aaron Brown,” but “[t]he other women want to watch Bravo’s Being Bobby Brown.” Learn about the greatest danger the women face from their prison guard: “If Judy lets her source slip, [the guard – name withheld here*] will be listening – and it’ll be curtains for Judy.”
Meanwhile, FAIR has issued a media advisory on Judith Miller: “Defending Miller’s Indefensible Choice — Her supporters point to principles her silence undermines.” MORE BELOW:
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*Read Rocca’s account to learn the guard’s identity. It’s the key to Plamegate.
Jail food is giving Judy’s tummy fits, reports Editor & Publisher:
[Ms. Miller] is enduring stomach problems from jail food. She is also sharing a cell unit that had originally been designed to house just one person. Because of that, Miller had been forced to sleep on a mattress on the floor for a few days but now has her own bed.
“It has definitely dawned on her that this is really in jail — it is certainly no summer camp,” Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told E&P Monday. “The food has not agreed with her and we have been trying to impress on her that she needs to eat. We have been hammering that in.”
From the conclusion of FAIR’s media advisory:
Robert Kuttner, editor of the American Prospect, has been sharply critical of the special prosecutor’s efforts to force Miller to testify. In the July 13 Boston Globe, however, he wrote a soul-searching apology, saying that the line he and others had been taking on the case was profoundly misguided:
In the Alice in Wonderland world of the Plame-Rove story, Judith Miller, who worked hand in glove with the Bush administration to publish bogus stories about Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear program, is a hero—for going to jail to protect, once again, her friends in the administration. And Time-Warner, which turned over Matt Cooper’s notes (for the wrong reasons—Time-Warner‘s corporate interests—but that’s another story) is the villain. Yet it may be Cooper’s testimony that finally sinks Rove. So who’s the hero and what’s the public interest?…
It’s one thing for reporters to protect a brave whistle-blower who has taken personal risks to serve the public interest. It is another thing for reporters to collude with the powerful to punish the whistle-blower, in this case Joseph Wilson, and his wife, an innocent bystander.
Is the public good served by helping Fitzgerald learn who at the White House broke the law? Or is it served by having reporters protect Karl Rove? We need a public interest test, not an absolute privilege.
Kuttner’s willingness to rethink his instinctual reaction to a case that brings up profound emotions for journalists is commendable. It’s to be hoped that others putting forth a blanket defense of Miller’s refusal to provide testimony will do some similar reevaluation.
Note: FAIR is the acronym for the group, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. FAIR is a national media watch group, and ” been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986.”
Emphases are mine. The fantasies are Rocca’s.
I couldn’t reveal much about Rocca’s exclusive on Miller and Lil’ Kim. It must be read in its entirety .. really read … sifting the clues.
Without giving anything anyway… thank you, Susan, for pointing us to the Rocca story. I agree it’s an important piece.
Clever fellow, he. Under the sometimes corny humor of the piece, there’s oh so much truth.
Often a little humor can get a point across so much more easily than a dozen serious articles, eh? That piece did make me giggle.
I’ll be damned. It’s good to know that I’m in the company of FAIR as I’ve been saying those same things for months now. Thanks for that link, I’m gonna go spread it around a bit now.
So she can’t stomach crappy institutional food or being incarcerated in an overcrowded institution. My heart just (raised middle finger) bleeds.
Funny how E&P doesn’t mention the thousands who get to enjoy that self-same experience every day.
Maybe she could do something constructive to take her mind off her troubles, like, I dunno, report on prisons in America? The US could stand an open debate on incarceration and human dignity.
Really!
Does anyone else find this section from E&P odd? How they talk about going to visit her, etc.? And what about her husband? Surely he’s been to visit?
I especially like that last quote. It’s almost like he’s saying, “All cons are equal but some are more equal than others.”
I found this particularly weird:
“We are trying to pace out the visitors over time,” Keller said. “So she is aware we are with her. So she doesn’t get a lot of visitors right away and then none for a while.”
You’d think the NYT staff would be clamoring to see their heroine.
And they’re worried nobody will show up after a while? So odd.
I wonder if the heralded NYT support isn’t as solid as they’d have us think. Could be too that, since so many others genuinely dislike her — from the WH press corps to the Pentagon — that she’s disliked at the NYT too.
The cynic in me reads …none after a while as “once she falls off the front page nobody will want to know”.
Until that happens, I imagining visiting Judy will be the NYT equivalent of a blood drive in other companies – people look funny at you if you don’t go.