← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 6963 | Posts: 7 | Started: 2003-05-28
2003-05-28 05:14 | User Profile
Suspended N.Y. Times Reporter Says He'll Quit Rick Bragg Decries 'Poisonous Atmosphere'
By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, May 27, 2003; Page C01
Month after month, year after year, Rick Bragg said, his mission was to "go get the dateline," even when that meant leaning heavily on the reporting of others.
"My job was to ride the airplane and sleep in the hotel," the New York Times correspondent said yesterday from his New Orleans home. "I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews and then was applauded by editors for 'working magic.' . . . Those things are common at the paper. Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants."
But now what he calls a "poisonous atmosphere" has descended on the Times -- one that prompted the paper to suspend Bragg for two weeks for practices he considers utterly routine -- and the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter says he will quit in the next few weeks.
"Obviously, I'm taking a bullet here," he said of the suspension imposed last week. "Anyone with half a brain can see that." But, he said, "I'm too mad to whine about it."
In the 3 1/2 weeks since reporter Jayson Blair resigned in the face of evidence that he had fabricated and plagiarized at least 36 stories, the Times has been going through a wrenching upheaval, with staffers openly complaining about the management style of Executive Editor Howell Raines. The floodgates have been opened for tips and complaints about other reporters, whose work is suddenly being scrutinized through a post-Blair prism. And Bragg, a Raines favorite whose evocative pieces about hardscrabble Southern life have produced plenty of fans and more than a few detractors, has become a particular target.
Bragg freely admits he did little firsthand reporting for the June 2002 story about Florida oystermen that prompted an editor's note last week. That note said credit should have been shared with freelancer J. Wes Yoder, who was hired by Bragg as a volunteer assistant and spent four days in the town of Apalachicola. "I went and got the dateline," Bragg said. "The reporting was done -- there was no reason to linger."
He recalls one Times editor telling him: "The problem with this, Rick, is that you wrote it too good."
Such Times stringers and interns "should get more credit for what they do," Bragg said, but in "taking feeds" from such assistants, "I have never even thought of whether or not that is proper. Maybe there is something missing in me. . . .
"I will take it from a stringer. I will take it from an intern. I will take it from a news assistant. If a clerk does an interview for me, I will use it. I'm going to send people to sit in for me if I don't have time to be there. It is not unusual to send someone to conduct an interview you don't have time to conduct. It's what we do.
"And this insanity -- this bizarre atmosphere we're moving through as if in a dream -- we're being made to feel ashamed for what was routine. . . . Reporters are being bad-mouthed daily. I hate it. It makes me sick."
Times editors are fully aware of these practices, said Bragg. He recalls asking to take an extra day on a story about a man who was awarded more than $1 million as the never-recognized son of musician Robert Johnson. But since the paper wanted the story immediately, he took two planes to Jackson, Miss., and "only got there by deadline," cobbling a story together literally on the fly.
When a jury convicted Timothy McVeigh in 1997 in the Oklahoma City bombing, Bragg wrote a lead he can still recite by heart: "After the explosion, people learned to write left-handed, to tie just one shoe. They learned to endure the pieces of metal and glass embedded in their flesh." The details, he said, came from "a stack four feet high" of clips from the Oklahoman, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle and other papers.
"From each one of the stories I took a piece of the pain he had caused people," Bragg said. "We backed it up with interviews. That's what we're supposed to do. We gather the string that's out there."
Bragg may feel especially aggrieved because he suffers from a serious form of diabetes which causes circulatory problems in his legs and feet that make it difficult to travel. He intended to leave the paper nearly two years ago after landing a million-dollar two-book contract, but Raines took him by the arm at a party in the editor's native Birmingham and "asked me not to leave." After Bragg argued with his editors over coverage of the Columbia space shuttle disaster, "I called Howell and told him I was done. He said it's stupid to quit over something like this." Again, Bragg agreed to stay.
Some Times staffers say that Bragg's case is extreme and that other correspondents don't rely on the reporting of stringers and assistants to nearly the same extent. But Bragg believes that reporters at the paper "have seen their lives kind of twisted and bent" because of the Blair fallout. He feels especially vulnerable because of his long association with Raines, who was forced to declare at a recent staff meeting that he will not resign.
"Everyone who ever wanted to get even for a slight or unpleasantry or act out their jealousy now has their chance, and it will continue," Bragg said. "What I don't understand is the callousness of some people who would try to use this situation to settle their political squabbles. It is shameful that some people are using it in a power grab at the newspaper. It's just about the saddest thing I've ever seen."
é 2003 The Washington Post Company
2003-05-28 05:19 | User Profile
They've done their deed at the NYT. The white sacrificial lamb has been taken care of. Things have been evened up in regards to Blair. They hope.
2003-05-28 06:18 | User Profile
More details on the Blair 'book'.
If there's one hilarious aspect to this, it's that the only accurate word to describe Blair is one every 'educated' white weenie in America has sworn a blood oath to never utter in public. How richly ironic to see the paper that houses "America's best journalists" hit the iceberg of race and sink, with every man aboard first making sure their gags and blindfolds are securely fastened before they go under.
[url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33419-2003May23?language=printer]http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer[/url]
Blair Book Proposal Lashes Out at Paper
By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, May 24, 2003; Page C01
In a racially charged book proposal bristling with anger at the New York Times, Jayson Blair likens himself to teenage sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo and rages at the newspaper he calls "my tormentor, my other drug, my slavemaster."
The proposed book, which some literary agents say could bring the disgraced former reporter a six-figure advance, is titled "Burning Down My Master's House."
Blair says of Malvo, the alleged triggerman in some of the Washington-area sniper murders last fall: "The moment I began to see parallels between his life and mine was the moment things began falling apart." He writes of "how the frustrations of black men in this world can explode, crescendo into a huge rage that can manifest itself in some odd and sometimes unclear ways."
In the proposal, which was read to The Washington Post by a source not connected to Blair, the 27-year-old admits that he "really screwed up," "distorted the truth" and "embarrassed the New York Times and myself." But the dominant motif is one of anger -- hurling unsubstantiated charges of racism at the paper and promising to reveal the Times's "darkest secrets," which he says, without offering evidence, involve drug parties and one editor's affair with an intern.
Blair casts his story as one of "a young black man" told he would never succeed "by everyone from his white second-grade teacher to his editor at the Times, who rose from the fields and got a place in the master's house and then burned it down the only way he knew how."
Blair grew up in a middle-class family in Centreville. His father is now the Smithsonian Institution's inspector general.
The reporter resigned May 1 after fabricating or plagiarizing at least 36 stories. He has infuriated many of his former colleagues, who already feel tainted by his actions, with his recent remarks about the paper and attempt to profit from his deceptions.
In the book proposal, he contrasts his life as an abuser of alcohol and drugs -- "I was an addict and didn't know it" -- with the "snobbish place" he found at the Times, its hallways filled with Ivy Leaguers. Blair attended, but did not graduate from, the University of Maryland.
He describes Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, the paper's most senior African American, as "race conscious" and says it was Boyd who assigned him to the sniper case. Blair says he got "some dazzling scoops," neglecting to mention that both the U.S. attorney in Maryland and the Fairfax County prosecutor have denounced his sniper stories as wrong.
Tired of being a reporter after less than four years, Blair decided that "I was not getting on another plane for the New York Times. . . . I cried out for help [and] spun into a deep depression. . . .
"The more I got away with, the more I stretched, and it was not simple laziness. Each one I got away with felt like a '[expletive] you' to an institution that I had long ago lost any love for."
As he began faking out-of-town stories without leaving New York, "I tried like any good addict to lie my way out of the situation." Blair says he "even concocted an elaborate description of my visit" to the West Virginia home of the family of former POW Jessica Lynch by relying on photographs. "It was the cunning, charm and deception I had learned running the drug hustle on the streets."
Blair takes a swipe at Metropolitan Editor Jonathan Landman, saying he is "no hero" despite having written a memo in April 2002 that urged senior managers to stop Blair from writing for the Times. Blair contends that admonition applied only to a two-week leave by the reporter.
Landman agreed yesterday that his memo "did not mean to say, 'Fire Jayson now.' It meant take care of his problems. They were taken care of."
But Landman said Blair is "exaggerating" what happened next. While Blair improved after being kept on a "short leash" and limited to brief stories, even after he left the metro staff, Landman said, "I told him repeatedly he was by no means out of the woods, he was acting erratically and had to get his act together."
As he did in a recent interview with the New York Observer, Blair repeatedly accuses the Times of hostility to blacks -- though he says being black also helped him -- without providing specifics. He writes that he was "working in a racist environment as a young, black recovering drug addict."
Blair displays a selective recall of the event that ended his Times career. He resigned the day after The Washington Post reported that he had plagiarized portions of a San Antonio Express-News report on a Texas woman whose soldier son was missing in Iraq and later found dead. The editor of the Express-News sent the Times a letter of complaint, and editors were pressing Blair, who had falsely claimed to have visited Texas and interviewed the woman, for an explanation when he abruptly quit.
In the book proposal, however, Blair said he resigned after the plagiarized story because there was "no point" in trying to hang on to "a job I could hardly imagine any black man really wanting."
The day the Post story appeared, Blair said he was in the bathroom in a cafe and considered trying "to hang myself" from a lighting fixture, but thought better of it.
After resigning, Blair says, he was getting drunk at the nearby Marriott Marquis when two representatives from the Times joined him. Writes Blair: "I figured they did not want my blood on their hands." But as the proposal makes clear, the Times has not heard the last of Jayson Blair.
é 2003 The Washington Post Company
2003-05-28 06:24 | User Profile
I think the jews will try and hog every space in the lifeboats. It's guys like Bragg that have to visit the abyss.
2003-05-28 16:01 | User Profile
But the dominant motif is one of anger -- hurling unsubstantiated charges of racism at the paper and promising to reveal the Times's "darkest secrets," which he says, without offering evidence, involve drug parties and one editor's affair with an intern.
Hugh Lincoln's prediction: 8 percent fewer White Americans will believe the "racism held me down" charge this time around. They've already stopped subscribing to the Times.
In the book proposal, he contrasts his life as an abuser of alcohol and drugs -- "I was an addict and didn't know it" -- with the "snobbish place" he found at the Times, its hallways filled with Ivy Leaguers.
Funny, wasn't the "radio host" who debated Jared Taylor on MSNBC using that very phrase? Snobbish? See, Whites are either violent, ignorant sister-humpers or Ivy League snobs. Dominant theme: none of them really like negroes.
2003-05-28 16:15 | User Profile
Bragg is one of those southerners that Howell Raines just loves.
That says all you need to know about him.
I have a sneaky Pete suspicion that if the public really knew how plagiarized and fictionalized all news coverage is they would be shocked.
Much if not most out of town hard news is simply rewritten from AP reports. Some acknowledge it - like the Washington Post - but most don't.
And as for anonymous sources - that is the nose of the camel under the tent that is in reality the whole freakin camel - hump, hooves, tail and all.
2003-05-28 16:38 | User Profile
Honest Hugh You wrote:> Hugh Lincoln's prediction: 8 percent fewer White Americans will believe the "racism held me down" charge this time around. They've already stopped subscribing to the Times.
I emphasized "The Times" because you were referring (sp?) to the New York Times. The real "The Times" is published in London and even though owned by Murdoch, still deserves priority over the New York copy. I have always thought it too grasping even for those New York Jews to arrogate that designation for their paper of record.