The Times published an editors’ note in the Friday edition that led to another day of frenzied guessing games at the paper’s Times Square headquarters. (When asked directly whether Bragg had been suspended, a Times spokeswoman would say only that “we do not comment on personnel matters.” Bragg could not be reached at his home in New Orleans.) The editors’ note concerned an almost year-old story of the type in which Bragg has come to specialize: novelistic tales of downtrodden or hard-bitten locals struggling to make it in the modern world.
The note read, “An article last June 15 described the lives and attitudes of oystermen on the Florida Gulf Coast who faced threats to their livelihood from overuse of water farther north. It carried the byline of Rick Bragg, and the dateline indicated that the reporting was done in Apalachicola. In response to a reader’s recent letter questioning where the reporting took place, The Times has reviewed the article. It found that while Mr. Bragg indeed visited Apalachicola briefly and wrote the article, the interviewing and reporting on the scene were done by a freelance journalist, J. Wes Yoder. The article should have carried Mr. Yoder’s byline with Mr. Bragg’s.”
The editors’ note didn’t address the fact that stringers virtually never get byline credit at the Times; indeed, the entire careers of some writers are based on their skillful crafting of facts gathered from stringers, or “legs.” As Slate’s Jack Shafer noted on Friday, the Times’ Robert D. McFadden won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for his spot news reporting; the Pulitzer citation noted that McFadden was known as “the anchor of the Times’ rewrite bank.” The difference with this Bragg piece seems to be that Bragg was evoking scene and color in a way that implied that he actually was on the ground, doing the reporting from the Florida Gulf Coast, thereby violating the Times’s policy of “dateline integrity.” McFadden’s work generally is datelined from New York, or not datelined at all. For example, McFadden’s May 4 story about the Old Man of the Mountain, a New Hampshire rock formation that recently fell, carried no dateline.
The editors’ note also didn’t answer more pressing questions about Bragg’s reporting, which has been the subject of newsroom speculation for years. Some Times reporters have referred to enhancing quotes as “Bragging,” and the Alabaman’s career includes a number of corrections that would probably have resulted in reprimands for less-favored writers. A March 2002 story about a mayor’s effort to ban Satan from her town, a March 22, 2001 story about vanishing showgirls in Las Vegas and a July 1, 1998 story about a small-town Alabama publishing couple who exposed a corrupt sheriff all included corrections so lengthy they seemed to undermine the initial pieces.
While Bragg’s current troubles have resulted in a certain amount of grim satisfaction at the paper, there’s a sense in the Times’s newsroom that the rules are changing in mid-game. “This could become a witch-hunt, which isn’t what anybody wants,” said one reporter at the paper.
There’s also a fear that over-anxious editors will slowly wipe out the novelistic detail and lively writing that has invigorated American journalism in the last several decades. One of the premises of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s was that news writing didn’t need to be dull and lifeless. And, of course, Bragg’s suspension makes life difficult for Howell Raines, the paper’s executive editor. Bragg and Raines are close personal friends, and Bragg is seen as the brightest shining of Raines’s hand-picked stars, though Bragg began his career at the Times years before Raines was named executive editor and won his Pulitzer when Joe Lelyveld was running the Times’s newsroom.
BOOK DEAL?
In other Times-related news, Jayson Blair’s circulated book proposal is resulting in outright derision. The proposal, which Blair suggests will result in a book titled “Burning Down the Master’s House,” shows the troubled former Times reporter still struggling to come to grips with reality. Referring to a story about the family of a missing American soldier that resulted in his resignation, Blair writes, “I was caught plagiarizing an innocuous story several weeks after chest pains that developed into a cancer scare sent me to the emergency room late one night.”
