If you were Howell Raines and knew that another incident of one of your cronies’ fabricating by-lines or inventing color or falsely appropriating other people’s reporting would lead to your demise, what would your stategy be? It would be to delay any announcement of the errors, to parse them out slowly so as to minimize their impact, and release the first item on the Friday before Memorial Day. Sure enough, the first news of any Blair-like errors can be found in today’s New York Times:
An article last June 15 described the lives and attitudes of oystermen on the Florida Gulf Coast who faced threats to their livelihood from overuse of water farther north. It carried the byline of Rick Bragg, and the dateline indicated that the reporting was done in Apalachicola. In response to a reader’s recent letter questioning where the reporting took place, The Times has reviewed the article. It found that while Mr. Bragg indeed visited Apalachicola briefly and wrote the article, the interviewing and reporting on the scene were done by a freelance journalist, J. Wes Yoder. The article should have carried Mr. Yoder’s byline with Mr. Bragg’s.
How brief was Mr Bragg’s visit to Apalachicola? Did he make it out of the airport? Did he stay the night? The New York Daily News has some background on Bragg’s very close relationship with Raines. Somehow, I don’t think this is the first item we will read about Bragg. But its timing suggests how hardball Raines is going to play. Will Bragg face any consequences for what seems like clear deception? I guess we know the answer to that, don’t we? But this item opens the sluice-gates for other papers to report on Bragg. Tick, tock.
The Dish 