BROOKE GLADSTONE: 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. Kurtz spoke to more than half a dozen unnamed Pentagon sources who claim that Miller acted as a middle man 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 Schafer 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.

JACK SCHAFER:What's fascinating about the Kurtz 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 MET 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 believed 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.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What was your reaction when you saw the Howie Kurtz piece?

JACK SCHAFER:Holy sh--. [LAUGHTER] If I'd read it as a piece of parody, I would have laughed hardily, but never really thought that Judy Miller was "intimidating and threatening" and basically had the U.S. military on the run. So I was fairly astonished.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:It's funny. There's - there seems to be a couple of Judith Millers floating through that piece. There's General Judy and then there's Intimidating Judy and then there's sort of Charming Judy pinning a medal on one of the soldiers.

JACK SCHAFER:The journalist wears many psychological faces. He charms the people that he needs to charm to get information; he might be blustering. He might be lackadaisical; he might flirt -- so I wouldn't be critical of Judy Miller simply because she will dig into a deep bag of tricks to get the story. On one level I have great admiration. She's aggressively chasing this story. She's absolutely convinced that there were weapons of mass destruction, and she's completely willing to share her information with the military to find it. It turns out that her information is probably not very good. This most recent excellent story by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post on one level can be read as a turf battle. Judith Miller's enemies within the military have come forward to criticize her roundly and in many cases anonymously, suggesting that she hijacked the MET Alpha team and coerced them. So this story presents her as General Judy --almost like she's a, a character in a remake of Three Kings.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:At least for me it seems to cross a line. I mean when Judith Miller as reported in the story wrote a letter objecting to an Army commander's order to withdraw MET Alpha from the field and suggested that she'd write about it unfavorably in the Times -- she was trying to influence behavior!

JACK SCHAFER:I think reporters tell sources all the time if such and such happens, this is the kind of story that I'm going to have to write. But did she go too far? Based on what we see in the Kurtz story, it would suggest that yeah, she did go too far. She refused to talk to Howard Kurtz. She said her reporting spoke for itself. You know, maybe if she spoke for herself she could make a better case.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:I should say for the record that she didn't want to speak to us either. The question of weapons of mass destruction has been an incredibly important one in the post-war period. Judith Miller's stories have played an important role in that discussion!

JACK SCHAFER: Absolutely.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How would you characterize that role?

JACK SCHAFER:Viewed in today's context, Judith Miller's reporting on weapons of mass destruction from Iraq seemed very much like cheerleading. You can almost see her pump her fist in glory and victory in the air. She's going on television and saying that the findings that have been made there are not just smoking guns for weapons of mass destruction but the silver bullet, and you know, look back over the last two months of her reporting, you can see that her reporting is consistently exaggerated and overplayed the evidence for weapons of mass destruction.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:You know what I think is kind of interesting -- is that the New York Times in its, you know, four-page Jayson Blair expose made an effort to be transparent. The Washington Post more recently in its re-write of the Jessica Lynch rescue story was very transparent -- here's where we got this information; here's where we got that information; and here's where we got that other information that turned out not to be right. In the Howie Kurtz story there seems to be transparency for Judith Miller, but it isn't the Times or Miller who's providing it!

JACK SCHAFER:No, and I've suggested that the Times does need to re-visit this story and say where were we blinded, where were we too enthusiastic about finding evidence of weapons of mass destruction, and how can we correct the record? I think the time has really come for the New York Times to do a complete re-appraisal of the work of Judith Miller since mid-April.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay! Jack, thank you very much.

JACK SCHAFER: It's been my pleasure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jack Shafer writes the Press Box column for Slate.com. [MUSIC]