MILLER TIMEAh, that felt good. The above header is so easy to fall back on when writing about people surnamed Miller that I bet many a newsroom style guide specifically mentions it as a cliché to avoid at all costs. I'm pretty sure I've never used it, until now. It's a great relief.
Speaking of Miller and many newsrooms, I might as well post an e-mail that I bet many journalists around Washington have received this week — New York Times executive editor Bill Keller's e-mail to the staff upon meeting with her at a prison down in Alexandria. It
doesn't appear to be on Romenesko, but if I have it, so do a lot of people. And now so do you:
To the Staff:
Many of you have asked for an update on Judy Miller’s situation since she was marched off by the marshals a little more than a week ago. I had about 45 minutes with her Tuesday night, talking to her on a phone through a plastic partition in the visiting room of the jail, and I should tell you first that she is firm in her resolve and buoyed by the support of her friends, colleagues, and many readers. She asked me to thank you for your letters, and to apologize for the fact that she has strict limits on her right to reply. Both her letter-writing privileges and her ability to call out are constrained.
But what about the decor at the Alexandria Detention Center? Does Judy like the food? And how does she handle tv privileges with her blockmates? After the jump, more revelations from Keller.
The Alexandria Detention Center is comparatively clean and reputedly safe, but it is unmistakably a jail. The color scheme is drab, the general mood is downbeat, and there is no such thing as privacy. The cellblock - she is in a block of about 20 women, incarcerated for non-violent offenses - is crowded. Cells intended for single inmates are doubled up, so that Judy has been sleeping on a foam mattress on the floor. I’m told that her cellmate is being released today, which means Judy graduates up to the lone bed - a foam mattress on a metal plank. She has had some trouble keeping the food down, and the commissary, which offers supplementary snack foods, has been closed since her arrival.
Judy keeps up on the news through visits from her lawyers and a regular stream of friends, family and colleagues - and through occasional snippets of CNN and Fox News. (The women in the cellblock take turns picking the program on the communal TV set. Her neighbors put up with Judy’s thirst for news, and she in turn is learning a lot about hip-hop videos.) We are trying to arrange for her to get newspapers. The jail circulates a cart of library books, a collection of potboilers and light fiction among which Judy was startled to discover a copy of “The Gulag Archipelago.” Who says the corrections bureaucracy is humorless?
Say what you will about Judith Miller, but going from Ms. Chalabi to Ms. Solzhenitsyn in this short a time is no mean feat.
posted by WWB at 7:51 PM |
