N.Y. Times Suspends Reporter - Pulitzer Winner Failed To Give Freelancer Credit
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
The other shoes start dropping.
The fallout over the Jayson Blair debacle at the New York Times has hit a far more prominent Times reporter, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg.
In an editor's note yesterday, the paper said that Bragg had only briefly visited the Florida town of Apalachicola, from which he filed a story last June, and that most of the reporting had been done by a stringer. That freelance reporter, J. Wes Yoder, should have shared a byline with Bragg, the paper said.
Times sources said yesterday that Bragg has been suspended, although the duration of the sanction could not be learned. Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis declined to comment on whether Bragg had been disciplined.
Asked if this was a serious infraction, Mathis said: "The story was accurate, and Bragg did indeed go to Apalachicola, though briefly." Asked if disciplinary action had been taken, Mathis said the paper does not comment on such matters. She said the Blair controversy "has produced a variety of tips" about questionable work by other Times reporters, "and we have telephoned reporters to pursue those tips."
Bragg did not return calls yesterday, but he said in a recent interview from his New Orleans home that he has never faked a dateline. He acknowledged that he sometimes relies on stringers and researchers and may visit a given town only briefly because of deadline pressures.
"I've made plenty of mistakes," Bragg said, but insisted he is constantly getting on and off airplanes and had never been dishonest in his reporting.
At another time, Bragg's feature about struggling oystermen on the Gulf Coast would have drawn little notice. But the environment has grown far more charged since Blair, who resigned May 1 and was found to have fabricated or plagiarized at least 36 stories, was caught claiming to have filed reports from Maryland, West Virginia, Texas and Ohio without ever leaving New York.
Times staffers say that national bureau reporters like Bragg are under constant pressure from Executive Editor Howell Raines and his management team to get in and out of cities quickly and accumulate as many datelines as possible. Some staffers may touch down in a city shortly before deadline and file a piece based largely on phone interviews done by researchers in New York -- a practice that, to varying degrees, other newspapers sometimes pursue in tight deadline situations.
Bragg, who considered leaving the Times two years ago after publishing his second book, is known to believe that he has become a target within the paper because he is close to fellow Southerner Raines, who had to approve all his assignments.
Bragg is renowned for his portraits of hard-living, hard-drinking Southerners, as typified by his first book, "All Over but the Shoutin'," a best-selling account of how his impoverished mother raised him and his two brothers in the Deep South. That kind of writing about Southern characters earned him a Pulitzer for his Times work in 1996.
A March 2002 front-page report by Bragg about a proclamation banning Satan from the town of Inglis, Fla., became the subject of an extensive editor's note. Among other errors, Bragg's piece failed to note that other town officials said the mayor was speaking only for herself, and that a local commission had earlier ordered the mayor to reimburse the town for the cost of issuing the proclamation and had the postings removed from public property after the American Civil Liberties Union threatened a lawsuit.
Yoder, now a reporter at the Anniston (Ala.) Star, said in an interview yesterday that he had volunteered to be an assistant to Bragg and was never an official Times stringer. "I just told him I wanted to come learn from him," said Yoder, who moved to New Orleans to be near Bragg.
He did interviews and other reporting for Bragg on 15 stories, with the oystermen yarn involving the most work, and didn't feel exploited when Bragg got all the credit. "We have nothing to hide," Yoder said. "We didn't do anything wrong."
While the stint was supposed to be unpaid, Bragg "probably felt sorry for me" and wound up "paying my rent and got my lunch every day and sometimes my dinner," Yoder said. "He was very generous," Yoder added, saying he believed Bragg paid these expenses out of his own pocket.
The issue of datelines and the use of stringers is part of a sweeping examination of Times practices by a committee formed in the wake of the Blair embarrassment. In a memo, Assistant Managing Editor Allan Siegal, who runs the committee, said its members would "analyze the Blair episode itself" and "determine when, where, how and why our newsroom's culture, organizational processes and actions led to a failure of our journalism."
Siegal also asked whether the paper's dateline policy is "too rigid," saying: "Is it a useful and necessary safeguard of truthfulness, or is it an invitation to gimmicky compliance with the letter of the law in defiance of the spirit? Procedurally, how do we check up? . . . How much use of stringer or intern legwork do we permit? What are the differences between various desks and bureaus on this point? Would we be embarrassed if readers knew the extent of stringers' contribution to reporters' work?"
The committee is adopting a sweeping mandate in an attempt to restore both public confidence in the paper, which was shaken by the Blair revelations, and morale in the newsroom, where anger at Raines's autocratic style erupted at a staff meeting last week. The panel's subjects will range from "accuracy controls" to "performance evaluations," from whether the intermediate reporting program under which Blair was hired is really targeted at minorities to how readers are treated when they call with complaints.
While such committee recommendations often gather dust, the Siegal group's findings will likely receive widespread attention because of the intensity of the Blair scandal. The panel includes three outside members: Louis Boccardi, the outgoing CEO of the Associated Press, George Mason University professor and former Washington Post editorial writer Roger Wilkins, and former Post ombudsman Joann Byrd, now editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
The Times has long resisted the notion of hiring an independent ombudsman, a job that exists at about 30 American papers, but the Siegal committee will examine that issue as well.
One question about hiring an in-house critic, according to the Siegal memo: "Can an ombudsman be kept insulated from the fashions of outside political and social pressure?"
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