"IMPROPER NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES" AT THE NY TIMES: Times Probe Hitting Road

NY DAILY NEWS ^ | 3/5/02 | Paul Colford's Hot Copy

[Liz]

Readers of The New York Times may not have heard the last of Michael Finkel.

Two weeks after the paper said Finkel would get no more assignments, because the writer used "improper narrative techniques" in a piece from Africa for The New York Times Magazine, a review of his other articles continues.

According to Finkel, The Times is "sending someone into Haiti and Gaza," areas that figured in two pieces he wrote for the magazine in 2000.

Asked if locales mentioned in Finkel's eight other pieces were being visited as part of an ongoing investigation, Times assistant managing editor Allan Siegal said: "All we can say at this point is that we're using every means necessary to confirm that what we published is correct.

"We don't have further details to offer."

Responding to a question about The Times' fact-checking procedures, Siegal said: "We are certainly studying what we could have done better or differently within the constraints of time and staff size, but for the moment we've reached no conclusions except that the Finkel/Malé article appears to have been a lone aberration."

In the November piece, Finkel's description of Youssouf Male, an African youth who worked on a cocoa plantation, improperly incorporated details learned about other boys in similarly hard circumstances.

"The New York Times is doing a very thorough reinvestigation into all of my articles," Finkel said. "I'm 100% confident they won't find any incident like this."

"If we find anything else, we will convey that to our readers," Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said.

Meanwhile, Finkel's piece in 2000 about Haitians coming illegally to America by sea, which won him a $10,000 Livingston Award, also is being reviewed by the awards panel at the University of Michigan.

"This is proactive on our part," said Charles Eisendrath, a former Time correspondent who is director of the Michigan Journalism Fellows program.

[Leisler]

All stories about based upon how rich, white Americans don't care. The guy is a fraud, and commited the ultimate NYTimes sin, got cought.

[Liz]

Yeah, guess he left a "paper trail"........LOL.

[aquaculture]

This guy is a fantastic writer; I hope this was an isolated indiscretion and not something that taints all his work. And no, his pieces aren't about white people who don't care. In the Haitian boat people story, the entire boat was saved from destruction by the resourcefulness of the US Coast Guard.

[mewzilla]

Evidently, the word fraud as well as all forms of the word plagiarism are missing from the NYT's dictionary. Uh oh. Shall we take up a collection to send them a new one?

[Liz]

Collection for the Times? OK. Here's my two cents.......

[Leisler]

Fiction as fact is fraud. He joins Mike Barnicle and a host of other liberal scribblers.