NYT Scandal Has Legs!
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Saturday, May 24, 2003, at 4:12 PM PT
I've been in the journalism business for a couple of decades now, including a brief stint at a daily paper. I always thought that when I read a New York Times reporter's byline on a story it meant the Times reporter had actually gone out and reported the story. I was so naive! ... The sensational news from yesterday's Editor's Note isn't so much that the New York Times' Rick Bragg fraudulently suggested he was present when a quaint oysterman spouted quaint, perfect quotes as he pushed his quaint boat over Apalachicola Bay (if, in fact, this ever happened at all). As Jack Shafer notes, Bragg has been an editor-protected scandalette-waiting-to-happen for years. But I'm genuinely shocked--not for-show shocked and not "shocked, shocked"--at the apparent complaints from other Times reporters that they're now confused because they routinely rewrite the reporting work of stringers (non-Times freelancers) and slap their own bylines at the top! Blair was arguably an aberration. This seems to be systemic. According to the New York Post's Kelly and Barack:
Many Times staffers said they were surprised by the note, since it is common for Times reporters to use material from stringers without giving credit.
"People write off memos filed by stringers a lot," said one insider. "The policy was that the person writing the story got the byline." [Emphasis added.]
Instapundit has posted reader e-mails confirming this NYT practice, and he's shocked too! ... More: Isn't this sort of rewriting-from-files what Newsweek and Time famously do? Wasn't the N.Y. Times 's form of journalism alway considered a bit purer because the person who did the reporting also did the writing and stood by it? It turns out we weren't reading the reporting of the famous, cream-of-the-profession Times employees, but the reporting of unidentified "stringers" we've never heard of. ... Conventional journalists sometimes sneer at blogs because there's no way for a reader to know whether what a random, unknown person says on his Web site is true. But it sounds as if the Times is not so different from a blog after all--what you are reading is really the work of random, unknown "legs" and stringers. ...
P.S.: Of course, in other ways the Times and the typical blog are very different forms of jounalism. One obsessively reflects the personal biases, enthusiasms and grudges of a single individual. The other is just an online diary! ...
P.P.S.: According to WaPo's Howie "Konflict" Kurtz, an internal memo from Allan Siegel, head of the newly appointed NYT in-house reform committee (or was it his stringer?), asks, "Would we be embarrassed if readers knew the extent of stringers' contribution to reporters' work?" Gee, do you think? Could that be why the stringers' contributions are, you know, kept hidden? ...That one should take a few months to answer. ...
P.P.P.S.: An obvious solution to the Time's secret-stringer problem is to name the actual reporters, the way Newsweek typically does. (It also helps Newsweek and Time that many of their actual reporters are well-known figures, not unknowns.) ... But the other solution is to go in the other direction--eliminate all bylines and let the reader assume that every story is the product of a collaborative rewrite. That's what the Economist does. But a) Times reporters would never stand for the Economist solution; and b) The Economist system, unless rigorously policed, seems like a recipe for Bragg-style fakery. ... Not that British journalism has a reputation for that sort of thing! ...
P.P.P.P.S.: Not only did the Times, as Andrew Sullivan notes, pick a Friday before a holiday to announce the potentially tipping-point-tipping Bragg reprimand. It picked a holiday Friday when Romenesko was on vacation! ... Embattled Times editor Howell Raines really must be worried. ...
P.P.P.P.P.S.: Kausfiles' East Coast stringer, the rumpled, homespun Robert M. "Bobby" Kaus, confirms the deep, deep antipathy toward Raines at the Times. ... [Hasn't the Times had autocrats before? Remember Abe Rosenthal?-ed. Yes. But I guess it's one thing to have an autocrat, like Rosenthal, who is an autocrat in pursuit of some idea of institutional greatness. It's another to have an autocrat who is seen as pursuing his own vendettas and crusades.]
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