Earlier this week the Daily News published a "hatchet job" on NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton's decision to hire broadcast journalist-turned-cop John Miller to oversee the department's Intelligence and counterterrorism efforts. Today Bratton and Miller went on CBS, Miller's former employer, to have a little fun at the paper's expense. Think Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly promoting Stepbrothers 3, only these two are the most powerful men in the country's largest municipal law enforcement agency.

The Daily News article featured an unnamed "high-ranking counterterrorism official" and a woman on the street who both panned the appointment in their own, delightfully hackneyed way (Leonard Levitt suspects that Ray Kelly, David Cohen, Kelly's former Intelligence chief, and Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman, had a hand in the piece.)

CHARLIE ROSE: So why are people saying well he doesn’t have the same required skills as other people who have had this job?

  JOHN MILLER: I’m not sure that people are saying that. That was one article in one newspaper who quoted one anonymous source who speculated, and then a woman they stopped walking down the street.

  BILL BRATTON: Who was that woman, by the way? Have they tracked her down yet?

  JOHN MILLER: You know, strangely detectives from the intelligence community picked her up and treated her to a PowerPoint that went about an hour long about my credentials and then she was dropped off near her home. If you found her today she says very nice things. Not really, I’m kidding Charlie.

It's funny because it's true!

JOHN MILLER: You can look at resumes, they have a certain value on paper, or you can look at deeds. What the New York Times did when they did the same story was they talked to several dozen people who had worked with my operation in Los Angeles, at the FBI in Washington, as a Senior National Intelligence officer in Washington, and what you got was a very different story there about the effectiveness of those operations. So outside of saying, OK I’m human, it hurt my feelings, there’s no there, there.

That Times reporter fired off a guilt-tinged tweet after Bratton personally called to "congratulate" him on his article. The Miller Machine had bagged its first trophy since returning to 1 Police Plaza.

Charlie Rose finally manages to ask the question we proffered several weeks ago:

CHARLIE ROSE: Are you in your heart a journalist or a law enforcement official?

  JOHN MILLER: I would change that to say am I a journalist or an intelligence officer, only because there’s almost no difference. Intelligence is nothing more than understanding a problem. Intelligence with very good analysis is understanding a problem well enough to do something about it. That means collecting the facts, analyzing them down to what do they mean, what’s the potential effect and what’s the potential response. The work of intelligence officers and reporters is extraordinarily similar. You become a briefer. You tell your boss, here’s the bottom line. These are the potential responses. That’s kind of what you all do.

Miller's recent work hasn't vacillated between fighting for the public interest and serving his country, it's singular purpose has been protecting and promoting the government's prerogative to carry out its initiatives without interference or meaningful scrutiny. This doesn't make him a journalist or an "intelligence officer," it makes him a tool. An indispensable one at that.

CHARLIE ROSE: Would you have taken this job if you knew that you couldn’t convince him to join you?

BILL BRATTON: I would not have, being quite frank with you.