Meanwhile, Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse has announced her plans to write television criticism, but we suspect her editing duties will be keeping her plenty busy for the time being.

"It brought a lot of stuff back," Ms. Miller told The Times' Adam Liptak this weekend. "Parts of it were very disturbing to me."

Ms. Miller, who now works for Fox News, told Mr. Liptak that she had "nothing to do with the movie," but she did meet with Kate Beckinsale, who plays her sorta-kinda onscreen doppelgänger:

While she drew inspiration from Ms. Miller, according to Mr. Liptak, Ms. Beckinsale did most of her research on the news business by spending time with reporters from The Los Angeles Times.

As you may already know, the movie offers a fictionalized retelling of the Judith Miller-Valerie Plame scandal, and stars Kate Beckinsale as a journalist sent to jail for protecting her source in the outing of a C.I.A. operative played by Vera Farmiga. The film features Matt Dillon, Alan Alda, Angela Bassett, and David Schwimmer.

Also appearing in the trailer: MSNBC anchor turned flack Dan Abrams in the role of a journalist.

Update, 12:25 PM: Ms. Miller spoke to Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp, telling him, "I get to spout my views, I will NOT be joining the news team... I care about First Amendment issues and free speech and I will talk about that and foreign policy if and when we ever stop talking about the economy, which is going to be going on for a while."

She also tells Politico's Michael Calderone, "I was a Hillary supporter who has gone over to the Obama side... Lots of people think they know what I believe, but don’t."

Ms. Winfrey posed the question to Entifadh Qanbar, a spokesperson for the Iraqi National Congress—an erstwhile group of Iraqi exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi that, at the time, was busy lobbying the American government to overthrow Saddam Hussein. “Absolutely,” responded Mr. Qanbar.

Later, Ms. Winfrey called on an audience member. “I hope this doesn’t offend you,” said the young woman. “I just don’t know what to believe with the media and…” Ms. Winfrey cut her off. “We’re not trying to show you propaganda,” Ms. Winfrey explained. “We’re just showing you what is.”

Four-and-a-half years later, with American troops embroiled in a seemingly intractable civil war in Iraq, and the reputation of Iraqi National Congress in tatters, the question of what exactly Ms. Winfrey and the rest of her colleagues in the media were showing to millions of American viewers on the eve of invasion begs a second look.

Tonight at 9:00 p.m., PBS will be airing a special episode of Bill Moyers Journal, entitled, “Buying the War,” which takes a long, hard look at the American media’s performance in the months leading up to the start of the war. The result is a detailed portrait of media groupthink gone horribly awry.

Throughout the 90 minute program, a large number of print and broadcast journalists--from Oprah, to Judith Miller, to George Will, to the Sunday morning talk show pundits, to Roger Ailes’ legions at Fox, to William Kristol, to the reporters on the evening network news, to Vanity Fair’s David Rose—are shown passing along hyperbolic stories about Iraq’s biological and nuclear weapons capacity.

As it turns out, many of those overblown stories relied almost exclusively on the false claims of hawkish administration officials and dodgy Iraqi defectors. Claims that often went unchecked by some of the best minds in the business.

There were exceptions, and throughout “Buying the War,” Mr. Moyers gives plenty of airtime to the reporters who got the story right, particularly to John Walcott, Jonathan Landay, and Warren Strobel of the erstwhile Knight Ridder news service.

The show also features captivating interviews with 60 Minutes’ Bob Simon, the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus, and an apologetic Dan Rather.

“Especially right after 9/11, especially when the war in Afghanistan is going on, there was a real sense that you don’t get that critical of a government that’s leading us in war time,” Walter Isaacson, the former chairman and CEO of CNN tells Mr. Moyers. “Big people in corporations were calling up and saying, ‘You’re being anti-American here.’”

Reached by phone on Monday, Kathleen Hughes, the producer of “Buying the War,” said that the documentary has been a year in the making. “Bill has called this a historical documentary except the history is only four years ago,” said Ms. Hughes.

“By and large most of us in the media accepted the administration’s point of view,” said Ms. Hughes. “I think that had to do with what some of our reporters say in the show--that there seemed to be an almost bipartisan belief that Saddam Hussein was keeping a big arsenal and that we had to be worried about him. But when you look at the Knight Ridder reporting you begin to understand that there was plenty of detailed, accurate information available in real time. That was the biggest surprise.”

Did the largely unflattering portrayal of the press leave Ms. Hughes feeling depressed about her profession?

“No,” said Ms. Hughes. “I still have a tremendous amount of respect for journalists. We all have our good work and our not so good work. I still think it’s a noble profession. Just look at the Knight Ridder guys. In this case, they’re my heroes.”

Ms. Miller—the redoubtable, doubtable New York Times scoop artist—was on the phone Monday afternoon, giving an interview on her way to get an interview. The quick-change routine is well practiced by now: from reporter to news object and back again.

But even Ms. Miller sounded a bit breathless from her latest adventures. On Oct. 7, federal judge Thomas Hogan had found her in contempt of court for refusing to discuss her confidential sources and ordered her to jail for up to 18 months—then freed her on bond pending an appeal. The next morning, it was front-page news in her own paper; two days after that, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and chief executive Russell Lewis commandeered the top of the Sunday Op-Ed page for a booming defense of Ms. Miller and, in the bargain, the freedom of the press.

“Her crime was doing her job as the founders of this nation intended,” they wrote.

In the middle of it all, on Saturday, Ms. Miller had a page-one piece of her own, a joint byline with Eric Lipton on an article about the Iraqi oil-for-food program. Her aim, Ms. Miller said, had been to “try and get a front-page story in my paper, to show people that I’m going to continue writing.”

The prospect of martyrdom seemed to have left Ms. Miller in high spirits, if not exactly glad ones; her end of the conversation was peppered with incredulous laughter. “I’ve been kind of amazed at the outpouring of support from other journalists,” she said.

Ms. Miller is in the varied collection of reporters entangled with the grand jury investigating who leaked of the identity of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame to the press. The leaked information was published not by Ms. Miller, but by conservative columnist Robert Novak in the Chicago Sun-Times, as the Bush administration attempted to (depending on who’s telling the story) rebut, intimidate or smear Ms. Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who’d criticized the administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.

Till now, the W.M.D. question has done nothing to burnish Ms. Miller’s journalistic credentials. On Oct. 3, The Times ran yet another piece revising its prewar coverage of Iraq’s mass-destructive capabilities. Following the lead of The Washington Post—which had broken the same news 14 months earlier—The Times meticulously demonstrated how the Bush administration had tilted evidence so that captured aluminum tubes, meant as Iraqi artillery rocket parts, could be passed off as nuclear centrifuge components.

And if The Times was more than a year late reacting to The Post, it was more than two years late reacting to itself. Far down, the Oct. 3 piece offered an implicit confession of institutional and reportorial failure: “[O]n Sept. 8 [2002], the lead article on Page 1 of The New York Times gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program …. The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes.”

The Times didn’t name the authors of the original piece, but they were Ms. Miller and Michael R. Gordon.

Yet by Monday, there was no more thought of the suspicious tubes—nor MET Team Alpha, the baseball-cap-wearing mystery scientist, or the rest of Ms. Miller’s dubious or anonymous portfolio. Ms. Miller was no longer the Belle of Babylon, the volunteer page of the Iraqi National Congress, Miss Bad Intelligence Rising herself. She was Judy again.

That was how the op-ed from Mr. Sulzberger, her old colleague at the Washington bureau, referred to her: “Judy Miller”—not “Judith.” Sending Judy Miller to jail, Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Lewis argued, will threaten the press’ “ability to gather and receive information in confidence from those who would face reprisals from bringing important information about our government into the light of day.”

Ms. Miller said she was heartened by the brass’ public declaration of solidarity. “It’s less lonely,” she said, “but it makes me wonder what happens when this happens to someone who doesn’t have the power and the influence and the money of The New York Times behind them.”

Had something like this happened earlier in her career, when she wrote for the less formidable likes of The Progressive magazine, Ms. Miller said, “a lawsuit would have turned me towards being a real-estate broker.” (“Of course, I would have been richer,” she added.)

Even with the stand-up-for-the-little-man rhetoric, though, there is a certain Nazis-marching-through-Skokie tone to the present case. Ms. Miller is not going to the mat for some helpless whistleblower; she’s defending the right of high officials to try to anonymously sic The New York Times on a subordinate who bucked them. Mr. Wilson signed his own name to his criticisms, and it was the confidential sources who allegedly sought reprisal.

“For some group of people, that would be called whistleblowing,” Mr. Sulzberger said on the phone Tuesday evening—for instance, he said, people who thought Mr. Wilson’s complaints about the administration (aired in a Times op-ed) hadn’t shared all the relevant facts.

“I’m not suggesting that you have to agree every time with whether that person should have given out that information,” Mr. Sulzberger said.

Floyd Abrams, Ms. Miller’s lawyer, offered a similar view. “The law can’t distinguish between good leaks and bad,” Mr. Abrams said. Mr. Abrams is also representing Time magazine’s Matt Cooper, who will be facing Judge Hogan today in his own contempt hearing in the Plame affair. Mr. Cooper appears almost certain to share Ms. Miller’s fate, in which case Mr. Abrams said their appeals will be lumped together in the Court of Appeals. If they lose, both could be in jail by Thanksgiving.

It could make a reality-TV show, Ms. Miller suggested brightly: “Matt and me and Martha.”

Unlike imprisoned journalist Ms. Stewart, neither Ms. Miller nor Mr. Cooper has been convicted of anything. Their confinement is meant to coerce them into telling the grand jury about their sources. So they would be held till the grand jury is finished—or 18 months, whichever comes first, Mr. Abrams said.

“I’ve only had one other client who was sent away,” Mr. Abrams said. That was The Times’ Myron Farber, jailed for refusing to provide evidence during a New Jersey murder trial in 1978 and held till the trial was over. “He was there for 40 days,” Mr. Abrams said. “I used to bring him donuts on Sundays.”

Now he may see two more clients behind bars—despite the reporters’ markedly different approaches to handling the Plame leak. Mr. Cooper, presented with the top-down whistleblowing, wrote an article denouncing the leakers. “I wrote the first piece saying that there was an effort to smear Joe Wilson,” Mr. Cooper said. “I shouldn’t have to go to jail for that. I shouldn’t have to go to jail for doing my job.”

But Ms. Miller can top that: She never wrote anything about Ms. Plame at all.

“Judy Miller being threatened with jail for having gotten information for a story she never wrote and we never ran is illogical to me, and dangerous,” Mr. Sulzberger said.

Would Times editors who might have known of Ms. Miller’s reporting also be eligible for a subpoena? Mr. Sulzberger said he didn’t know whether her work had even entered the editorial process, and didn’t care to explore the implications. “I think one person in jail is enough for The New York Times,” he said.

And Ms. Miller said that the differences in individual reporters’ actions are beside the point. “The last thing I want to do is start dividing journalists,” she said. “ … This is not the time to start saying, ‘Why me and not him?’”

Ms. Miller did, however, note one division between herself and other subpoenaed journalists. Some reporters, including Mr. Cooper, agreed to testify about one particular source, Vice Presidential chief of staff Lewis (Scooter) Libby, after Mr. Libby waived his confidentiality agreement with them.

Despite Mr. Libby’s apparent enthusiasm to put his remarks on the record, Ms. Miller described the waivers as a “pernicious” concept. “I do not consider these waivers voluntary,” she said.

Mr. Sulzberger and Ms. Miller both argued that the case shows the need for a federal shield law, establishing legal protection for reporter-source agreements akin to that for lawyers and clients, or priests and parishioners.

“It’s not about Judy Miller,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “It’s bigger than that.”

“This is really all about the readers,” Ms. Miller said. “This is all about the public—the public’s right to know.”

Even so, a lot of it is about Judy Miller. “Keep those cards and letters coming,” Ms. Miller said.

And while the legal encroachment on anonymous sources may threaten one of Ms. Miller’s favorite reporting tools, it hasn’t cut into her ability to report. “Quite the opposite,” she said. The current case, she said, proves her commitment to her methods: “I’m willing to go to jail to protect my sources,” she said.

It also gives her a rebuttal to any “snotty” Millerologists, who’ve tried tracking the way her bylines seem to rise and fall in frequency along with the tide of W.M.D.-themed editors’ notes and follow-up stories.

“For all those people who wonder what happened to Judy Miller,” Ms. Miller said, “what happened to Judy Miller was she got involved in something called the American legal process.”

These journalists are out of touch. They don't understand the seismic consequences of the Iraq war, which is slowly transforming our politics (beginning with the Congress). Journalists failed us in that war; Judy Miller disgraced the New York Times by carrying the water for Richard Cheney and thereby misleading a society, with the gravest consequences. In fact, you might say that Judy Miller's testimony is her most honest reporting yet about the way the Iraq war was engineered. Thank you, Judy and Scooter; now I know why the VP's tragic/literary chief of staff routinely took hours of out of his days to talk to reporters.

This trial has demonstrated the corruption of "access journalism," which these journalists like to style as "professional." The crisis of leadership that Iraq represents is also theirs. In the Information Age, they failed us by pushing this war on the basis of false information about WMD and no information about the hidden agendas. It turns out that the less access you had, the more clearthinking you were about what a bad idea it was to invade Iraq. Why does Barack Obama look so good right now? He wasn't in the Senate, that's why; he wasn't compromised. I.F. Stone and Noam Chomsky always said, it's more important to read than to go to a cocktail party.

The professional bloodletting that is happening in the Libby trial, the destruction of all those promises journalists made to the White House—this can only serve journalism right now by restoring traditional virtues of the writing business: a sense of vocation that has nothing to do with corporate salary, a sense of citizenship that has nothing to do with Meritocratic Election, and a sense of detachment that wants nothing to do with imperialistic misadventures that are bound to cause untold suffering in another part of the world.

Ricks was defending the Post's coverage during the run-up to the Iraq War, and drew some laughter from the New York Times-toting crowd last night at the 92nd Street Y.

The occasion was a panel discussion moderated by veteran journalist Robert McNeil, and featuring former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle Perle, documentary Filmmaker Martin Smith, and Ricks. Prior to the heated discussion on the war, two clips were shown from "America at a Crossroads," a week-long PBS series that premieres in April, that features Smith and Perle.

Perle, who still defends the invasion of Iraq, took plenty of criticism from the floor: there were several shouts of "liar," a fair amount of hissing, and the ejection of one audience member who was shouting about how the Bush administration benefited from 9/11.

But later, during a press Q&A, Perle took the opportunity to swipe back at Ricks.

(As Perle, Smith and McNeil sat down for the post-panel Q&A, Ricks passed through already in his overcoat. Ricks said that as a reporter, he shouldn't be up there answering questions).

"I didn't have a chance inside to defend my friend Judy Miller," said Perle. "I don't know if the New York Times is still here."

"Judy reported, with the great skill she possesses, what she was being told by people who had access to the information, who believed what they were telling her. The derision that she has suffered, because some of that information is inaccurate, is an appalling way to judge--particularly--a fellow journalist.

"I think that anyone who goes back over what Judy was writing will find that it was professionally sourced, and accurately reported. I was following what she were writing, and I knew what people in the administration, and elsewhere, were saying, based on the information that was available to them. I think that she has been dealt with unfairly. It particular pains me that Tom--that a remark would come from a fellow journalist."

-Michael Calderone

Such a blatant threat to the freedom of the media might once have stirred national outrage, or at least a spirited debate.

But if government intrusion into the media’s rights isn’t receiving the attention it deserves, the press has only itself to blame, with leading outlets like The New York Times weighing in on the subject inconsistently and in a way that seems to be motivated more by political ideology than institutional self-interest.

The recent ruling on phone records was issued by a federal appeals court in New York on Aug. 1. It related to a grand-jury investigation into who told Times reporters that two Islamic charities were going to be the subject of government action in 2001.

Prosecutors contend that phone calls the reporters made seeking comment from the charities tipped off the organizations to forthcoming raids and asset freezes.

One of the reporters was Judith Miller, formerly of The Times. The lead prosecutor in the ongoing case was her “Plamegate” nemesis, Patrick Fitzgerald.

Ms. Miller, reached by The Observer while traveling, responded scornfully to the accusation that she or her colleague tipped off the charities.

“That’s such crap,” she said. “We had to ask them for comment on the story. I don’t know what Fitzgerald knows and what he doesn’t know about journalism, but I presume he knows that much.”

(The other reporter was Philip Shenon, who is still with The Times.)

As for the ruling itself, Ms. Miller said, “I just can’t tell you how ominous this is. If this were to hold, Philip Shenon and Judy Miller and every other investigative reporter is going to have to start acting like a drug dealer, meeting people on street corners and using untraceable cell phones.”

The judgment was the latest big setback for the media. But one of the reasons why the press has failed to effectively resist its adversaries is simple: Its most exalted organs have tied themselves up in knots on the subject of leaks.

The editorial and opinion pages of The Times, in particular, have condemned disclosures that have been helpful to the Bush administration, while defending the broad right of officials to secretly pass on information.

That stance has only served to strengthen the paradigm pushed by the media’s most trenchant critics—that some leaks are morally wrong and thus deserving of punishment.

Two examples stand out. One is the Plame affair, the other the furor in April over the President’s declassification of parts of a prewar National Intelligence Estimate (N.I.E.).

It is increasingly apparent that no crime was committed in the course of Ms. Plame’s identity being revealed. Moreover, the leak exposed a fact of legitimate public interest—that Ms. Plame had played a significant role in sending her husband, Joseph Wilson, on his now-infamous trip to Niger.

Similarly, the partial declassification of the N.I.E. added to public knowledge about a matter of vital importance.

On the question of where responsibility really lay for the erroneous predictions about Iraqi W.M.D., it was germane to know the general tenor of a document that purported to represent the best thinking of the intelligence community.

The October 2002 N.I.E. expressed “high confidence” that “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs.”

The problem with these leaks, for at least some in the media, seemed to be that the information they revealed favored Mr. Bush.

In an October 2003 column about “Plamegate,” Maureen Dowd made the blanket assertion that “The issue is the administration’s credibility, not Joe Wilson’s.”

But if the subject under debate is the White House’s alleged mendacity, why is the honesty—or otherwise—of its accuser not relevant?

In an April editorial during the N.I.E. flap, The Times huffed that “this president has never shown the slightest interest in disclosure, except when it suits his political purposes.”

The same could be said of almost all Mr. Bush’s critics. Yet The Times, like any other media organization, would not (and should not) complain about briefings by the President’s detractors if the details they revealed were true.

The press’ most esteemed outlets have embraced this selective argument and, in so doing, have ceded precious ground to their tormentors.

That ground will not be easily won back. And m­any reporters will yet have cause to rue the confused rationales offered up by the high priests of their profession.

Such a blatant threat to the freedom of the media might once have stirred national outrage, or at least a spirited debate.

But if government intrusion into the media’s rights isn’t receiving the attention it deserves, the press has only itself to blame, with leading outlets like The New York Times weighing in on the subject inconsistently and in a way that seems to be motivated more by political ideology than institutional self-interest.

The recent ruling on phone records was issued by a federal appeals court in New York on Aug. 1. It related to a grand-jury investigation into who told Times reporters that two Islamic charities were going to be the subject of government action in 2001.

Prosecutors contend that phone calls the reporters made seeking comment from the charities tipped off the organizations to forthcoming raids and asset freezes.

One of the reporters was Judith Miller, formerly of The Times. The lead prosecutor in the ongoing case was her “Plamegate” nemesis, Patrick Fitzgerald.

Ms. Miller, reached by The Observer while traveling, responded scornfully to the accusation that she or her colleague tipped off the charities.

“That’s such crap,” she said. “We had to ask them for comment on the story. I don’t know what Fitzgerald knows and what he doesn’t know about journalism, but I presume he knows that much.”

(The other reporter was Philip Shenon, who is still with The Times.)

As for the ruling itself, Ms. Miller said, “I just can’t tell you how ominous this is. If this were to hold, Philip Shenon and Judy Miller and every other investigative reporter is going to have to start acting like a drug dealer, meeting people on street corners and using untraceable cell phones.”

The judgment was the latest big setback for the media. But one of the reasons why the press has failed to effectively resist its adversaries is simple: Its most exalted organs have tied themselves up in knots on the subject of leaks.

The editorial and opinion pages of The Times, in particular, have condemned disclosures that have been helpful to the Bush administration, while defending the broad right of officials to secretly pass on information.

That stance has only served to strengthen the paradigm pushed by the media’s most trenchant critics—that some leaks are morally wrong and thus deserving of punishment.

Two examples stand out. One is the Plame affair, the other the furor in April over the President’s declassification of parts of a prewar National Intelligence Estimate (N.I.E.).

It is increasingly apparent that no crime was committed in the course of Ms. Plame’s identity being revealed. Moreover, the leak exposed a fact of legitimate public interest—that Ms. Plame had played a significant role in sending her husband, Joseph Wilson, on his now-infamous trip to Niger.

Similarly, the partial declassification of the N.I.E. added to public knowledge about a matter of vital importance.

On the question of where responsibility really lay for the erroneous predictions about Iraqi W.M.D., it was germane to know the general tenor of a document that purported to represent the best thinking of the intelligence community.

The October 2002 N.I.E. expressed “high confidence” that “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs.”

The problem with these leaks, for at least some in the media, seemed to be that the information they revealed favored Mr. Bush.

In an October 2003 column about “Plamegate,” Maureen Dowd made the blanket assertion that “The issue is the administration’s credibility, not Joe Wilson’s.”

But if the subject under debate is the White House’s alleged mendacity, why is the honesty—or otherwise—of its accuser not relevant?

In an April editorial during the N.I.E. flap, The Times huffed that “this president has never shown the slightest interest in disclosure, except when it suits his political purposes.”

The same could be said of almost all Mr. Bush’s critics. Yet The Times, like any other media organization, would not (and should not) complain about briefings by the President’s detractors if the details they revealed were true.

The press’ most esteemed outlets have embraced this selective argument and, in so doing, have ceded precious ground to their tormentors.

That ground will not be easily won back. And m­any reporters will yet have cause to rue the confused rationales offered up by the high priests of their profession.