Month: May 2003

Rick Bragg’s self-righteous and self-pitying defense of his dubious journalistic methods appears to have been the last straw for some others at the NYT. Here’s an email penned by Times veteran reporter Todd Purdum that sums up the mood:

“Of course, we use stringers on fast-breaking stories in multiple places: school shootings, natural disasters, political campaigns. Of course, we use stringers to baby-sit at long trials, listen to procedural motions, fetch documents and monitor routine press conferences, especially if other, more important elements of a story are happening elsewhere and the principal reporter has to monitor those developments. Of course, when we do roundups, we take feeds from all over. But nobody, and I mean nobody that I’ve ever heard of (besides Rick Bragg!) farms out the chance to spend a day on an oyster boat (eating some of the nation’s best oysters, by the way!) for a wholly leisurely, discretionary, writerly feature story! These stories are why journalists are lucky to get paid for our work! … Any correspondent, editor, manager or reader who thinks this remote-control method remotely reflects the way we do our jobs is living in a dream world. I’m terribly sad that our family problems have become fit fodder for the world to pick apart. But Rick Bragg’s method is not typical. It’s aberrant and repellent. Some of our colleagues have known this for years. Now the world knows it, and we’re all the poorer.”

Notice the penultimate sentence: Some of our colleagues have known this for years. What he means is that Bragg’s high-living, corner-cutting excesses have been an open secret at the Times for the past two years. Heck, as soon as the Blair story broke, I was inundated with tips about Bragg. I didn’t use them because I had no hard evidence. But his colleagues knew all along; and Howell Raines knew all along. Bragg was Raines’ man. He was allowed to do what he did on explicit orders from Raines. This is now the latest of a series of debacles that Raines has inflicted on the Times by his management style. And when you read the kind of comments picked up by the indispensable Seth Mnookin, you wonder how on earth Raines can continue in his job.

ANOTHER FREUDIAN SLIP: One of the emails Mnookin unearths is particularly interesting. It shows that one reason many NYT scribes are mad at Raines and Bragg is that this scandal has severely dented the Times’ ability to spin the news in a left-liberal direction while hiding behind the veil of the “paper of record.” Once that reputation has been trashed, how can they keep that game up? They’ll be seen as just another biased news outlet, if much bigger and better than many others. Here’s the money quote from Tim Egan – yes the Tim Egan who lied on the front page about rising temperatures in Alaska:

What will come of this infighting, cannibalism, and soul-searching? Hopefully, we’ll go back to valuing what we have: people who care about the drift of this country, and are given the time and respect to tell it right.

Hmmm. What does he mean, “the drift of this country”? I think we know – it’s headed rightward. And the job of the Times is not to give us all the news that’s fit to print, but to haul it to the left. On the one hand, Bragg and Blair. On the other, Egan and Hedges. The choice at the Times is between frauds and ideologues. (Of course, there’s also Paul Krugman, who manages to conflate the two.)

“I am one of those insecure people that drag the “luggage that needs wheels” onto the plane. Clearly, you are fortunate enough to make a living writing little snippets on a computer in the comfort of your pajamas at home, and have no need to travel on a regular basis. But a big chunk of travelers out there are like me: people who have to commute cross country on a regular basis, who have to spend 10 to 40 hours a month on an airplane or in airports. To us, its game of odds. If one travels 10 times a month, its pretty likely the airline will screw it up at least once and destroy your plans for that day or week. And even if the airline does not lose your luggage, the extra 30 minutes to an hour to stay on the longer line to check in your luggage (even the gate checks can be pretty painful nowadays) and the extra 15 to 30 minutes to pick up the luggage adds up. And you only need one time a month, when the line goes out the door to learn to bring your bags on board. On average, a 2 hour flight becomes a 3 hour flight, and if you make the trip twice a week, you are talking a lot of hours. The fact is, being able to pack a week’s clothing into a carry-on is a godsend, and well worth it. One hour of a road warrior’s time is worth 5 minutes of a wait for the Memorial day traveler, even if he has a blog to bitch on.” – more feedback on the Letters Page, edited by Reihan Salam, who gets a credit and a small amount of your cash.

THE TRENT LOTT DEFENSE: Rep. Chip Pickering, Charles’ son, is trying to rally local black leaders behind his father by promising that he would lobby for a “diversity candidate” to replace his father on the federal court in Hattiesburg. More consistency from Republicans on race. From a cynic’s perspective, it looks as if they’re against affirmative action if it hurts white people; but in favor of it if it indirectly helps white people, especially old white people from the South. I’ve now read several long stories about Charles Pickering. The intricacies of his treatment of a delinquent racist cross-burner have left me queasy and with an unfortunate impression: that this relic of an old South still feels the need to cater, even mildly, to white prejudice. Why on earth is the Bush administration going to bat for this guy a second time around?

From Newsday, an analysis of how the Times has been brought down to earth by the Internet and blogs:

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, said that at the Times, “nobody had a very good explanation why those who helped Bragg report aren’t bylined in the story. It’s sort of institutional confusion.” Rosen said that more broadly, the traditional acceptance of authority in newspapers is coming under greater question in the Internet age. “Bragg is probably kind of an arbitrary victim of that,” he said. “For a long time journalists haven’t had to explain very much how they do things,” Rosen said. “The Internet has created the expectation that news organizations can be interacted with, can be questioned.”

Imagine that. News organizations questioned. Next up, we’ll be demanding that Howell Raines actually talk to the press! My only quibble with Rosen is his notion that Bragg is an “arbitrary” victim. Far from it. He was a slipshod crony waiting to be exposed. The scandal is not that it happened. But that for so long, he went unexamined.

Yep. That deceptive quote you first read about here is now being looked into by the Times. Let’s see if they make her run her own correction. (And, no, running a correct version of the quote in a subsequent column is not a correction. It’s a pathetic ruse to avoid responsibility for a simple and deliberate lie.)

GELDOF ON BUSH: Finally someone says it who might get taken seriously by the usual suspects. On AIDS, president Bush’s commitment simply out-classes Bill Clinton’s. By a mile. So too does his actual commitment to Africa, for all Clinton’s grandstanding. Here’s Bob Geldof on the current president: “You’ll think I’m off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical – in a positive sense – in its approach to Africa since Kennedy.” Another great quote from a British AIDS activist: “Clinton talked the talk and did diddly squat, whereas Bush doesn’t talk, but does deliver.” Therein the precise difference between this administration and the last.

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?

A parish in Lansing, Michigan, gets a married priest. He is a convert from, well, I don’t know, because the church won’t say and he has been forbidden to talk to the media. He’s not just married: he’s been married for 25 years and has three sons. There are, apparently, 200 married priests in the United States, proof that there is no good reason that married men cannot be good Catholic priests. So why continue the mandatory celibacy policy which has led to such a collapse in vocations in our current world, and has successfully selected some of the most sexually-screwed-up people on the planet to be priests? There’s no good answer – none, except bloody-mindedness from reactionaries and institutional inertia. Meanwhile, the Church is dying in this country for lack of good priests. And the Vatican would rather see the American church die than ever concede it could change its mind.

So now we know that the head of al Jazeera was also in Saddam’s pay. Yes, I know the Arab press hardly has the standards of, er, say, the New York Times, but people should stop treating al Jazeera as if it is a credible journalistic source. It’s an adjunct to Islamo-fascism.

David Horowitz, God bless him, takes on the theocrats again. His core point is an obvious but important one: most of the religious right simply see no distinction between religion and politics. Or rather, they see politics primarily as means to promote their religious beliefs. Nothing could be less amenable to the moderation and skepticism at the core of political conservatism. David is particularly powerful when addressing the specious rhetoric of those who argue that homosexuality is a “choice”:

In my view, Knight’s statement is a prejudice dressed up as a moral position. It presumes that homosexuality is a choice, while all evidence points to the contrary. The conversion movements have been miserable failures. They have recruited a highly motivated and extreme minority among homosexuals – people so unhappy with their condition that they are desperate to change it – and the results are pathetic. Only a tiny minority of what is itself a tiny minority of people willing to go through the conversion process achieve a well-adjusted heterosexual result. That is my personal view, but it is irrelevant to the issue at hand. Even if Knight were correct in thinking that homosexuality is a moral choice, and that Christians and Jews have a moral obligation to oppose it, this would not alter the fact that it is inappropriate and self-defeating for philosophical conservatives to make this their political agenda. A mission to rescue homosexuals is a religious mission; it is not an appropriate political cause.

But the reason the far right has had to go back to the notion of homosexuality as a choice is because their arguments – indeed the vast majority of the arguments – against gay civil rights collapse if homosexuality is not, in any meaningful sense, a choice. Once you concede the eternal existence of homosexuals, a political solution would require bringing conservative principles to bear on certain obvious questions: How do we integrate gays better into society? How do we help nurture their relationships? How do we reach out to those gays who agree with conservative principles? These are the questions the far right wants undiscussed. They’re failing to end this discussion or change the subject. And they deserve to fail.

MY PET PEEVE: In a phrase: “carry-on luggage.” My flights to and from Chicago were full. Almost everyone brought on some immense piece of hand-luggage, the kind of hand-luggage that needs wheels to get it onto an airplane. All these people spent an enormous amount of time and effort huffing and puffing to drag these bulky dead-weights into the overhead compartments. During the flight, I observed maybe two people actually open the bins and get something from their bags. The rest just brought them with them – even though they’d already checked bigger luggage. What’s up with this? Maybe people simply don’t trust the airlines with their checked luggage and so pack an entire week’s worth of emergency clothing, laptops, etc just in case. But I think most of it is simply insecurity. People feel naked traveling without some kind of luggage dragging around their feet. They need to get over it. Travel would be so much more pleasant, so much quicker, so less goddamn irritating, and, yes, safer if your average plane traveler checked their real bags and took on only those things they might actually need in flight. But I guess I might as well expect affordable space travel in the next few years. Okay, just venting. Feel better now.

WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA? An interesting exchange on Howie Kurtz’s “Reliable Sources” this past weekend. The discussion was about the liberal-left leanings of most political drama on television. Why isn’t there a conservative version of, say, the “West Wing?” Over to Howie:

KURTZ: One thing these programs have in common, conservatives are practically invisible. President Bartlett in The West Wing is a Democrat. Martin Sheen, in fact, made anti-war ads before the invasion of Iraq. “Mr. Sterling” is a California liberal based loosely on Jerry Brown. Why aren’t there any Republicans?
O’DONNELL: You will never get that TV show. You’ll never, ever get the Republican TV show. the Writers Guild of America, my union, is at a minimum, 99 percent leftist liberal and, like me, socialist. And we don’t know how to write it. We don’t.

Was there some irony there? Sure. But truth as well.

Took a long weekend, as some of you noticed. The Dish will get more steam up as the day progresses and as my hangover recedes. But I’m traveling today too – back again from Chicago, where Memorial Day was spectacularly beautiful. On breaking stories, Mickey Kaus has the latest on the NYT meltdown. The scandal now, apparently, is not that Rick Bragg regularly ripped off stringers for his pieces (with no credit) but that this is NYT policy. Gets better all the time, doesn’t it? But I did get a chance to read John Colapinto’s excellent take on the next generation of college Republicans in Adam Moss’s magazine. Yep, they’re much more comfortable with diversity (including gays) than their predecessors. Their conservatism takes this multicultural reality as a base and builds an intelligent conservatism on top of the new world we live in. I wish the GOP would not have to wait a generation to get this message. But it’s one I’ve been preaching in this space for quite a while. Glad to see the younger generation gets it.

THE SECRET OF ANNIKA’S POPULARITY: Yes, she’s sexy. But the way in which the public rallied behind Annika Sorenstam’s pioneering golf game was surely because of something else: she represented an old, pure form of feminism, a message that has been somewhat lost in the politically correct culture wars of the last decade or so. Sorenstam, after all, was not portraying herself as a victim of male oppression. She’s a fabulously successful sportswoman, a wealthy celebrity, and happily married. She wasn’t asking for special treatment in any way. She played exactly the same course, under exactly the same conditions as her male peers. Despite the fact that women’s courses are generally shorter and less troublesome than men’s, Sorenstam played with the big boys – and beat many of them. And she’s refreshingly free of political posturing. She’s not aiming to be a feminist icon. She’s trying to play golf as best she can against the best competition in the world. She is also not attempting to deny the obvious: that there are significant differences between men and women. The more we learn about the impact of hormones such as testosterone and estrogen and the deeper our understanding of evolutionary psychology, the clearer it is that some differences – in physical strength, subtle mental attributes, emotional temperament – can vary with gender. That’s why we don’t have co-ed sprinting races or expect women to compete with men in the shot-put. But what we have in common as human beings vastly overwhelms what differentiates us as members of one gender or another. Sorenstam is a pioneer in accepting this, and reveling in it. She’s not indistinguishable from the men; but she is competitive with them. She’s different but equal. Americans are far more comfortable with this kind of social message – and for a good reason. It’s about integration, not separatism. It’s about personal achievement, not group grievance. It’s about merit, not complaint. It’s about golf, not politics. Sorenstam cannot be accused of claiming any “special rights.” She’s embracing the old American virtue of doing your best against the best, and not letting anything – gender, race, class, religion, sexual orientation – get in the way. That was once the core, simple, unifying message of the civil rights movement. Odd, isn’t it, that it took a Swedish female golfer to remind us.

POSEUR ALERT I: “This manly exhibition was no accident. The media team that timed Bush’s appearance [on the U.S.S. Lincoln] to catch just the right tone of sunlight must have chosen that uniform and had him try it on. I can’t prove they gave him a sock job, but clearly they thought long and hard about the crotch shot. As students of the cinematic, they would know that the trick is to make the bulge seem natural, so it registers without raising an issue. Tight jeans (a staple of Bush’s dress-down attire) can achieve this look, but nothing works like fighter-pilot drag, with its straps that frame and shape the groin. Most people presume this effect is merely functional. That frees the imagination to work, and work it does, in men and women alike … Say what you will about the male body being objectified. We may expect a dude to display himself like an Abercrombie & Fitch model – but the president? Clearly Bush’s handlers want to leave the impression that he’s not just courageous and competent but hung.” – Richard “proud sissy” Goldstein, Village Voice.

POSEUR ALERT II: “This eulogy owes nothing to artifice or chance. It has ripened inside me since childhood. From the bottom of my pockets, stuck to the back of my smock, hidden in the corner of abacuses, poetry gushed out-…” – Dominique de Villepin, from the preface of his new book, “In Praise Of Those Who Stole The Fire.”

Jack Shafer is shaken out of his counter-intuitive spin-for-Howell mode by the Bragg story. He has the goods on other Bragg misdemeanors. Bragg has a long history of faking by-lines, and ripping off unpaid stringers. It turns out that he merely spent a total of two hours in Apalachicola for that elaborate, evocative, deeply reported story. He never even met any of the people quoted. Why is this any better than Jayson Blair? Bragg is unrepentant. And he gets suspended for two weeks. More evidence of Raines favoritism. This blatant attempt to bury this news, highlight only one story of Bragg’s, and give him such a light punishment could only serve to intensify the anger that many ethical journalists, who aren’t Raines suck-ups at the Times, now feel.