Daniel Okrent, the NYT's public editor, on the impact to a newspaper's credibility when one of its reporters pops off without thinking on TV.

Some excerpts:

AST Sunday, Times reporter Judith Miller appeared on MSNBC's "Hardball With Chris Matthews" to discuss the Iraqi elections. In the course of the conversation Miller said sources had told her the Bush administration "has been reaching out" to the Iraqi political figure Ahmad Chalabi "to offer him expressions of cooperation." She continued, "According to one report, he was even offered a chance to be an interior minister in the new government." This led Matthews to interrupt Miller, exclaim "Wait a minute!" and press her to elaborate.

Now, Matthews is the sort of television host who will interrupt a guest about as often as he blinks, and his reliance on exclamation is roughly equal to his reliance on breathing. But to anyone who has tried to follow the jagged contours of Ahmed Chalabi's connections to the Bush administration, Miller's statement was a shocker. This piece of news hadn't appeared in The Times that morning; it didn't appear in The Times the next morning; as I write this column, on Friday, it still hasn't appeared. A lengthy analysis of the election aftermath by reporter Dexter Filkins, published Tuesday, didn't even hint of any current contact between Chalabi and the Bush administration.

But if you watched "Hardball" on Sunday night, and saw Judith Miller identified as a reporter for The New York Times, you would have every reason to think she was speaking with the authority of the paper. That, presumably, is why television news and talk producers ask Times reporters to appear on their programs; that, presumably, is why The Times's publicity apparatus books broadcast appearances for as many as 12 different reporters in a typical week. Yet Miller's revelation - Jack Shafer of slate.com called it "the second biggest Iraq story of the day (after the successful election)" - was fit to be broadcast on television, even if not fit to print. Why the difference? ...

Judging by their absence from the paper, one must conclude that either Miller's Chalabi revelations were wrong or unsubstantiated or that The Times is suppressing an important piece of news. If the first, the paper has suffered a blow to its credibility: Matthews introduced Miller as "an investigative reporter for The New York Times." The ID on the screen said "Judith Miller, 'The New York Times'." At five separate points in the show Matthews invoked her connection to The Times, as any host would.

If there's an act of suppression going on, the price is of course incalculable. But I don't remotely think that is the case.

Something not mentioned in the Okrent piece is the fact that Chalabi was Miller's main source in her now-discredited work on the threat posed by Iraq's WMDs.

Has he got her on a string again?