The left-of-center media hold Democrats to a less-strict standard than they demand of Republicans, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Judith Miller says.
The former New York Times journalist and author of
"The Story: A Reporter's Journey" told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV on Monday that the public is acutely aware of the media's "double standard."
"It's very obvious that most of our colleagues in the media are left of center and they do hold Democrats to a different standard than Republicans — and people see it, they understand that," Miller says.
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"Journalism would be better off if people acknowledge their biases rather than try to do what I was trying to do all these years … to say I'm an objective reporter even though I have personal views.
"It's better if we just talk about what they are and then people would know what they're getting."
Miller takes on some of the
biggest stories of her career in her new book
"The Story: A Reporter's Journey," including the leaking of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame; Miller went to jail for 85 days to protect the identity of her source,
Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
"It's really a shocking incident," Miller says. "When you look at it in retrospect, I mean when you realize that the entire country was riveted on this story, which turned out to be a nonstory, a non-crime with which no one was ever charged."
Miller says she's not even sure Plame was a covert agent.
"She says she was a covert agent. There were many people who worked with her and said she wasn't," Miller says.
Miller also defends aspects of her most high-profile and criticized reporting on Iraq's amassing of
"weapons of mass destruction" before the 1991 Iraq war.
"These were not the weapons we went to war for, which is what readers of the New York Times read," she says, explaining the weapons cache involved "old munitions that were made before the 1991 Iraq war."
"However, the failure to account for the destruction of these weapons, the fact that [former Iraq President] Saddam [Hussein] claimed they had been destroyed and that they're still very much with us would suggest that he had not been forthright, he was not honest with the [United Nations] when he said he destroyed them and that was one of the justifications for war," she said.
Miller speculates some of her critics, however, may have lashed out "because I worked at The New York Times, which was the nation's most prominent newspaper back then. Maybe it's because I was a woman."
"They didn't ask about the stories that I co-wrote with many of my male colleagues," she notes. " I'm a pushy reporter, I probably stepped on toes. If you're a man, they say you're an aggressive reporter and there's a positive connotation."
Miller also concedes the media has a "very complicated relationship" with Democratic presidential candidate and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, calling it "a kind of a love-hate relationship."
"When they're not loving her, they hate her," Miller says. "[W]hat we need today is less opinion and more digging, more fact, more investigative journalism. Yet that is the most expensive form of journalism to do and very few news organizations want to invest in that today."
But the scandals surrounding Clinton as she launches her 2016 White House run only prove how important transparency issues will be, she says.
"That is outrageous," Miller says of Clinton's
personal email scandal.
"You cannot be the person who keeps the records and then also decides what's in the public interest, what's public record."
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