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"It fills the airtime with something other than 'there were shots and we don't know what's going on,'" he said. Following the Aurora shooting, Miller knew right away the police who would be responding since one of them once worked for him in Brooklyn, Rhodes said. Miller is hesitant to even call his sources "sources." "Sources are people you meet on other stories and you develop them into sources of information," he said. "I'm calling friends, and I'm asking them,
'What's happening here?'" For all their benefits, there's a danger of those relationships getting in the way of his job if authorities are criticized for wrongdoing or failures in their response to situations. Would Miller be able to publicly criticize or question his former colleagues? Host Charlie Rose asked Miller on Thursday about whether the FBI failed to more aggressively follow up on concerns about older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev's turn to radical Islam. "20/20 hindsight is going to be brilliant in this case because they're going to go backwards from a bombing reassessing it," Miller replied. He added: "The question is not
'did we do it by the book?' -- sure we did -- it's 'could we have done it any better if we had dug deeper or looked at something different?'" Citing his experience at both the FBI and with New York police, Miller on Friday dismissed criticism that the investigators should have told New York that the Tsarnaevs planned to head there with bombs. Times Square security had already been beefed up following the marathon, he said. "This seems like a lot of gnashing of teeth over nonsense," he said. For all her admiration of his work, McGinnis said she didn't know whether Miller would be able to set aside relationships from his past life in cases where things have not been handled well. Fager said that such concerns don't hold up if you look at Miller's reporting. "He's tough," Fager said. "He's inquisitive. He'll go anywhere." For his part, Miller said, "I am reluctant to criticize authorities." "My interpretation of when they need to be (criticized) and somebody else's might be different," he said. "If you've been there and you know how that works and what it's like, and how easy it is to take potshots from the outside, your criticism is more measured, your analysis of what is worthy of criticism and what isn't is slightly different." When the bombing story quiets down, Miller will no doubt have another pressing concern: his wife. That vacation. "I am currently in the correspondent's protection program," he said, "broadcasting under another identity and up at the Holiday Inn here between 9th and 10th (Avenues) until they can negotiate a time when I can go home again."
[Associated
Press;
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