Brian Harkin for The New York Times
John Miller, a senior correspondent for CBS News, has also worked for the New York Police Department and the F.B.I.
On the day of the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., reporters were struggling and failing to get their arms around a story too horrible to fathom. At our house, we stared at the incremental television coverage and came to realize that no one really knew anything.
Then, late in the evening, a reporter came on CBS in New York. He knew the number of casualties, the type of weapon used, and that the mother of the shooter was dead inside her home.
“Who is this guy?” I asked my wife.
John Miller isn’t a psychic or a genius. He’s a senior correspondent for CBS News who had spent the afternoon working his sources while helping anchor the network’s special coverage. Mr. Miller, hired a little over a year ago by CBS, became a constant figure in the coverage in the days that followed, bringing a rare level of seriousness to a story that seemed to bring out the worst in television news.
Low rated and often an also-ran, CBS News benefited greatly from Mr. Miller’s work, which helped it become the first network to break into programming with news of the shooting and the first to report the level of carnage.
Like many of his colleagues, he made some mistakes — “I was first with the wrong name” he pointed out ruefully — but everything he said on the air was based on actual reporting, not meaningless stand-ups at the scene that are full of drama but no information.
If Mr. Miller, 54, seemed to know what happened inside Sandy Hook Elementary School as soon as the police officials did, that’s because not that long ago, he was one of them.
A police reporter in New York for 20 years for various television stations, he was hired by William Bratton, New York’s police commissioner, in 1994 as a deputy commissioner. He went back to reporting at ABC in 1995 and became co-anchor of “20/20,” where he interviewed Osama bin Laden. He wrote a book on the Sept. 11 attacks and then went back to work for Mr. Bratton in 2003, this time in Los Angeles as head of the counterterrorism and criminal intelligence bureau, along with the major crimes division.
Mr. Miller went on to the F.B.I. and the office of the director of national intelligence, where he worked as deputy director of the analysis division. But he found himself thinking about a return to reporting after Bin Laden was killed.
“My wife said to me, ‘Let me get this straight, you are going to leave a good, safe job in government and wander around New York in the worst economy in years looking for a job as a reporter? That’s your plan?’ ” he said.
It was. He talked to Jeff Fager, chairman of CBS News and executive producer of “60 Minutes.”
“He is the definition of a pure reporter,” Mr. Fager said, “a really great fit with what we are trying to do here. On the big stories, we don’t want packages, we don’t do graphics, we want information. I could listen to John Miller report a story all day.”
Journalists are taught to be suspect of those who have gone through the revolving door, but Mr. Miller’s trip through that door left him uniquely suited for the Newtown story. He had run major investigations, supervised big crime scenes and handled the information flow for others.
“The information is coming in raw and in real time,” he explained in a phone call. “Forgive my grammar, but you have to filter into three questions: ‘What do we know, what do we don’t know, and when do we expect to know more?’ Everything is preliminary, everything can change, but you can’t just wait. You have to think through what you know and explain that.”
Mr. Miller said that when he was called to the anchor desk on Friday morning he protested, saying he should just report at his desk. But he ended up on the set with a laptop and a phone, working both when he wasn’t on the air.
The Media Equation: John Miller of CBS, at Home on Both Sides of the Police Tape http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/12/24/business/24carr/24carr-articleLarge.jpg
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