From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the media.

Bob Garfield is still away.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

This week in his Washington Post column, Howard Kurtz wrote a stunning expose of the questionable reporting practices of New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

Miller was embedded with the mobile exploitation team Alpha, or Met Alpha, charged with

searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Kurt spoke to more than half a dozen

unnamed Pentagon sources who claimed that Miller acted as a middleman between the unit and the

information-rich Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, and through the power of her

inside source, charm, and intimidation, actually influenced the military decision-making process.

Kurtz quotes one military official as saying that it is impossible to exaggerate the impact

she had on the mission of this unit and not for the better.

In the Post, New York Times assistant managing editor Andrew Rosenthal dismissed the charge

that she exercised influence over Met Alpha as an idiotic proposition.

Slate magazine's Jack Schaefer has been our man on the Miller Trail for the past couple of months,

and he says the Washington Post piece was something of a revelation.

What's fascinating about the Kurt's story is that it gives the reader a level of transparency with which to view Judy Miller's stories.

In all of the stories that she had reported for the Times,

she is basically playing the role of objective journalist, an observer who is following Med Alpha as they travel through Iraq looking

for weapons of mass destruction. And what she should have informed her readers of is that I have in many

cases what is to believe to be better intelligence than the military.

I am telling them where to go.

I am helping them apprehend individuals in that deck of cards of the most wanted.

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