Rick Bragg Quits At New York Times
Departure Follows Comments That Roiled Scandal-Shaken Newsroom
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 29, 2003; Page C01
Kurtz has put it all together here. An excellent story that shows why he has his job. The Editor from the Atlanta Constitution that was on PBS last night said she worked as a stringer years ago for the Times, and all of this went on. The thread on this that is being pulled gets longer and longer. Heads will have to roll.
The New York Times newsroom has erupted in anger over reporter Rick Bragg and his aggressive defense of relying heavily on stringers and interns, with many reporters denouncing the practice and insisting that's not the way they do business.
Bragg, who had made plans to leave the newspaper this summer after being hit with a two-week suspension, yesterday "offered his resignation, and I have accepted it," Executive Editor Howell Raines told the staff in a memo. "We know this has been a difficult period. We have full confidence in our staff."
Bragg said last night that he had hoped to stay a little longer, "but it's only going to cause more hurt feelings if I do. I don't want to cause any more hurt feelings, not my own or anyone else's."
With nerves already rubbed raw by the Jayson Blair fabrication scandal, Bragg's recent comments to The Washington Post, dubbed "infuriating and absurd" by business reporter Alex Berenson, fueled a heated debate yesterday about the mechanics of reporting, proper attribution, the limits of drive-by journalism and the granting of credit to unseen subordinates who contribute behind the scenes. And the repercussions are being felt far beyond Manhattan, as news executives around the country examine and in many cases tighten their policies.
Bragg's defense -- that it is common for Times correspondents to slip in and out of cities to "get the dateline" while relying on the work of stringers, researchers, interns and clerks -- has sparked more passionate disagreement than the clear-cut fraud and plagiarism committed by Blair. The issue, put starkly, is whether readers are being misled about how and where a story was reported.
Peter Kilborn, a national correspondent based in Washington, called Bragg's remarks "outrageous."
"I just don't do it," he said, adding that he has used stringers only to get minor details on breaking-news events. "I want to control the story. I know what the essential elements are for a feature story. I want to see the images. I want to hear the voices. It's a matter of pride. I'm not going to paint a picture and have somebody else come in with his brush."
David Firestone, a former Atlanta correspondent now based in Washington, said stringers were used mainly "when you couldn't be in multiple places. . . . The whole point of being on the national staff was to be able to travel through your region . . . to see people with your own eyes as you interview them. Getting a sense of whether they're telling the truth, of their emotions. If you have someone else do that for you, you lose something very valuable."
Several reporters posted impassioned letters on Jim Romenesko's online media column, with Berenson saying the effect of Bragg's comments was "to impugn the reputation of every reporter at the Times. . . . We do our own reporting here. At least most of us do."
But some Times staffers say Bragg is being unfairly singled out for working within a system in which interns and assistants -- what the newsroom calls "legs" -- are regularly assigned to do extensive firsthand reporting but almost never receive credit.
Lisa Suhay, a Times freelance writer who says her work on one article was badly distorted by Blair, maintained that Bragg "is being punished for what I, as a freelancer, have seen in four years as common practice.
"I have covered anthrax, plane crashes, roller-coaster disasters, interviewed the family of a local POW -- all high-profile stories, with no credit. . . . It was simply understood that I got paid to be invisible, a nonentity, entrusted to go to market to get the choicest bits for the dish being prepared."
Milton Allimadi, a Times metro stringer for two years in the mid-1990s, said he routinely filed crime stories that were "barely touched" by editors and reporters but never got a byline. "I often wondered how readers I had interviewed must have been surprised the next day. While interviewing them I identified myself as Milton Allimadi, and the next day the byline would be totally different," he said.
In a statement, Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said: "Like most newspapers, the Times has long relied on non-staff journalists to assist correspondents in their reporting, by conducting interviews, providing research assistance or helping to stake out the scenes of news events, especially when spot news is being gathered against a tight deadline." She said employees have been reminded that "such non-staffers should be used to supplement a correspondent's core reporting; they should not be used to substitute for that reporting."
Several Times staffers noted that Bragg was hardly under great pressure to produce, having filed just 23 stories in the past year.
Bragg, 43, said yesterday it's no secret that "in the last couple of years at the Times I have slowed down considerably. I've been mostly a soft-feature guy. That's what happens to you in this business as you get older, unless you enjoy the run and gun."
Bragg says he even introduced Raines to the volunteer intern he had hired, J. Wes Yoder, during a Raines visit to his native Birmingham.
As for the internal critics, Bragg said: "I didn't say everyone did it the way I did it. There are correspondents who did every word of their own reporting." But others sometimes write stories "based predominantly on reporting from other people," he said.
In some instances, the hierarchy has resembled a caste system. Tawnell Hobbs, a former Times intern in the Dallas bureau five years ago, said of the newspaper's correspondent there at the time: "He'd want you to be a hostess at one of his parties" and "to make his reservations" for vacations. While other interns did that, said Hobbs, now a reporter at the Dallas Morning News, "I didn't feel comfortable. I'm just an intern -- not the hired help."
While a Times committee is studying the issues raised by the Blair and Bragg episodes, other news organizations are taking preemptive action.
Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg News editor in chief, says the news service has dropped its policy of using datelines to reflect where the story's action is -- rather than the usual practice of indicating where the reporter is -- although that will continue to be noted at the bottom of each item. During the war in Iraq, Winkler said, a Baghdad dateline was slapped on a story even though the reporters were with British forces elsewhere in Iraq. "That could be misleading," Winkler said.
Margaret Sullivan, editor of the Buffalo News, said she convened her top editors for a frank talk about ethics in the wake of the Blair debacle.
Among other things, Sullivan decided to send more letters seeking feedback from people the News has covered and talk with younger reporters about the pitfalls of plagiarizing from the Internet. She also tightened limits on the use of unnamed sources, which was an issue in the Blair scandal and often raises questions in the minds of readers.
"Everybody in the newspaper business has been touched by this in some way," she said. "It's amazing to me how much regular, ordinary folks seem to know about this. We're all thinking about wow, could this happen here?"
Seattle Times Editor Mike Fancher told readers the paper will soon revive what he calls "accuracy checks," or asking the subjects of certain articles about their accuracy and fairness.
Miami Herald Editor Tom Fiedler has ordered that rather than use the vague credit line "Herald wire services," information must be attributed to a particular wire service or news outlet. He is also tightening rules about the use of datelines, attribution of quotes and credit for stringers.
"All of us feel a little wounded by what's happened with the New York Times, because the New York Times holds itself to a very high standard and in the minds of many people it is the standard-setter for journalism in this country," Fiedler said. "We felt we ought to make sure there is clarity in this newsroom about those issues."
The concerns have even reached the executive suite. Dow Jones CEO Peter Kann, who oversees the Wall Street Journal, said in a memo: "Any and every editor up the line in our editing process has the right -- and the responsibility -- to question sourcing."
Kann also cited "many potential misdemeanors well short of the crimes of plagiarism and fabrication. . . . I am thinking here of the anonymous negative quote questioning someone's character; the unreturnable post-office-closing phone call that permits a publication to say 'unavailable for comment'; the closed mind to an inconvenient new fact that doesn't fit a story line; the loaded adjective where no adjective is needed; the analysis that edges across the line to personal opinion."
The Washington Post often credits stringers and researchers in bylines or taglines at the end of stories, but the Blair mess prompted Phil Bennett, the assistant managing editor for foreign news, to send his reporters a memo on proper attribution, credit and dateline policies. "It's a constant temptation because the speed of information and the demands on correspondents conspire to put a great deal of pressure on them to cut corners," Bennett said. "You have editors saying, 'Get there now, we need the story immediately.' "
Media credibility is clearly suffering. A new USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll says that just 36 percent of those surveyed believe news organizations get the facts straight, compared to 54 percent in 1989. But despite widespread coverage of the Blair debacle, including a Newsweek cover story, about two of three said they are not following the story.
Most readers of the news may pay little attention to policies on crediting stringers and proper datelines. Many reporters have quickly dropped into a city to procure a dateline, after doing much of the reporting by phone, and some have used stringers and researchers to varying extents.
But when a story says that such-and-such a reporter filed a report from Milwaukee or Moscow, most journalists agree, there is an implied contract that he or she did a substantial amount of reporting from that place.
Such issues rarely surface in television, a more collaborative enterprise where producers and researchers often conduct key interviews and accumulate footage before the big-name correspondent arrives for a shoot. In 1998, when Peter Arnett, then a CNN reporter, narrated a documentary charging that U.S. forces used nerve gas during the Vietnam War, he was able to distance himself when the story had to be retracted, saying he had "contributed not one comma" to the piece.
The story that seems to have crystallized the debate is the Bragg feature on struggling oystermen last year that, in the post-Blair climate, led to his suspension. It began with a dateline of Apalachicola, Fla.:
"The anchor is made from the crankshaft of a junked car, the hull is stained with bottom muck, but the big Johnson outboard motor is brand new. Chugging softly, it pushes the narrow oyster boat over Apalachicola Bay, gently intruding on the white egrets that slip like paper airplanes just overhead, and the jumping mullet that belly-flop with a sharp clap into steel-gray water."
Bragg freely admits that he sent his intern, Yoder, who was compensated only with lunch and rent money, on the boat, while visiting Apalachicola only briefly.
Said Times reporter Kilborn: "He's presenting it to the reader as his art, as his work, and it wasn't."
Bragg has a different view: "I had a much better pair of eyes than I have right now out there. We often re-create a scene, or an image, based on someone's memory. I had someone there for four days, soaking up every detail, every nuance. Often that's what stringers are -- not just quote-gatherers, they're your eyes."
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