Miss Run Amok

The Reporter's Last Take (emphasis mine):

Then the political editor based in New York, Clymer was awakened just after midnight one morning by a call from Miller, he says. She was demanding that a story about Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis be pulled from the paper.

The story was too soft, she complained -- and said Lee Atwater, the political strategist for Vice President George H.W. Bush, believed it was soft as well. Clymer said he was stunned to realize that Atwater apparently had either seen the story or been told about it before publication. He and Miller argued, he recalls, and he ultimately hung up on her, twice.

To Clymer, it was an indication of what he and others believe is Miller's main problem.

'She had gotten too close to her sources,' he says.

Exsqueeze me? Lee Atwater said it was too soft?! Lee Atwater? Karl Rove's mentor had access to a NYT story on his political opponent before it was published?!