"HA-haaa"
Posted on 05/27/2003 12:31:16 AM PDT by Timesink
washingtonpost.com
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."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I hope Howell gets his nuts kicked.
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 Schadenfreude  |
-PJ
B. The practices he describes are, indeed, more common than people know. Somebody has to "get the dateline," and EVERYBODY relies on Nexis research for background. That is not plagiarism, so long as credits are properly given.
C. Want to guess how many stories datelined "Crawford, Texas" were mostly written on the plane trip from Washington and actually filed from a motel in Waco?
But Bragg resigned on Monday, which means the story is going to hit the papers on Monday, the most important day of the week (in terms of the news cycle). So this is going to hurt the Times.
I realize I am not a mighty newspaper editor, and I am certainly not an English linguist expert, but should that not read "you wrote it too well."???
"I will take it from a stringer. I will take it from an intern.
Spoken like a true Democrat.
That's the problem: The Times, and most newspapers, don't give the credits to the freelancers and the staffers that do most of the footwork. (For those of you lucky enough to not be in the journalism industry, what we're talking about is the way that, say, a magazine like Newsweek will publish a story "by" a specific person or persons - for example, this article on Al Qaeda "by" Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman and Evan Thomas, but will also note at the end of the article (scroll down to the bottom) that several other people were involved in gathering the information needed for the main authors to write the story (in this case: "With Mark Hosenball and Tamara Lipper in Washington, Christopher Dickey in Paris, Tom Masland in Lebanon and Emily Flynn in London." Newspapers like The New York Times don't generally give a damn about the Hosenballs, Lippers, Dickeys, Maslands and Flynns, and never credit them.)
The question, of course, is why this is somehow Bragg's fault this time when The Times never gives the foot soldiers bylines. He probably is being scapegoated.
I have noticed those names in articles in Time and Newsweek, but I assumed that this was because the story was so big it required people in several different cities.
If this is the practice at major newspapers, no wonder they make so many factual errors.
By the way, it looks to me like infighting and talking to other papers is accelerating. Excellent.
And he is too whining!!
Warms my heart. The liberal fortress is cracking in many walls. The TV media wall. The print media wall. The legislature wall. The registered voter wall. But their fortress has two baileys, much like a castle. This is the outer bailey. The inner bailey is the liberal courts, the universities, the think tanks, and the UN. We are already eye-balling them. When the outer bailey falls, its usually just a matter of time for the inner bailey. That means we have proven our strength and determination. But prayer never hurts. The outer bailey is always more fortified. FReegards....
It's like when liberal papers have two equal stories -- one about a democrat who rapes and murders young women and the other about a Republican who jaywalks. The jaywalker is the villain, and the top story.
Bragg is the jaywalker.
Dang it all, if that's not a coincidence.
That's the personal ad Howell Raines ran in the New Yorker.
Rick Bragg answered the ad......that's how he got hired.
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