WHERE’S HOWELL?

Another Raines favorite, Rick Bragg, quits after being suspended for having an unpaid intern report most of a piece with Bragg’s byline. (Great scoop, Howie.) The Wall Street Journal piece on Bragg is full of interesting nuggets (I read it on the plane back from Chicago.) The Apalachicola story wasn’t the only time Bragg essentially passed off others’ work as his own: a Miami intern, Ms Maribel Morey, claims “there were articles at the tobacco trial that are all of my quotes.” Bragg concedes “a couple of stories where she did ‘most’ of the reporting, including conducting a long interview in Spanish with plaintiff Guillermo Saa for a June 3, 2000, story.” We also learn that Kevin Sack, not a Raines crony, had far higher standards for his own stories, refusing to pass off interns’ work as his own. Bragg’s defense is that what he did was normal journalistic practice. But it wasn’t. The Apalachicola piece was written vividly as if the writer were really there, as Jack Shafer notes. It was, by any reasonable standards, a fraudulent piece of journalism. And there’s a difference between using interns and colleagues for nuggets of news or facts or preliminary interviews, and using their work as the flesh and bones of a story and putting your own name on it. The question this raises, of course, is whether Bragg got away with pushing the limits of journalistic ethics because he was a favorite of the big guy. The Journal lets us know that Bragg had dinner with Raines and the ripped-off intern, Wes Yoder. Money Yoder quote: “It wasn’t like Rick was hiding anything from Howell, or anyone else at the Times.” So what did Raines know, as the Mickster asks? It seems to me that the story is pretty obvious: a Raines favorite, a Southerner, was given to believe he could do no wrong. He pushed the envelope. Raines covered for him, as he covered for Blair. These two journalistic departures – Blair and Bragg – have only one thing in common: Raines’ cronyism. If they have gone, so should he. When will he step down?