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
"The Beat goes on." This story's legs keep getting longer and longer.
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."
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