"Pinch" Sulzberger's stuffed moose collection. The green one? They don't call 'im "Pinch" for nothing.
Posted on 05/23/2003 8:17:08 PM PDT by Valin
NEW YORK - The New York Times has suspended Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Rick Bragg for two weeks, the Columbia Journalism Review reported Friday, the same day the newspaper published an editors' note about his handling of a feature story about Florida oystermen.
The note said that while Bragg wrote the June 15 article and visited the Gulf Coast town where it originated, interviewing and other reporting at the scene were done by a freelance journalist working for the newspaper. The note did not make it clear whether Bragg's editors had known the role of the freelancer at the time.
Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis declined comment Friday, saying the newspaper doesn't publicly discuss personnel matters. A New York Times employee told The Associated Press that staff members became aware of the suspension on Friday. The employee said the length of the suspension was not clear.
Bragg, 43, a national correspondent based in New Orleans, didn't immediately return a telephone message Friday.
The suspension comes two days after the Times announced a committee of 20 staff members and two outside news executives to review newsroom policies after the May 1 resignation of reporter Jayson Blair. The newspaper found fraud, plagiarism and errors in 36 of 73 articles written between October and April.
In its editors' note, the Times said a reader had questioned whether Bragg had been in Apalachicola, Fla., the dateline of his story about threats to the livelihood of oystermen on the Gulf Coast.
The Times said Bragg visited Apalachicola briefly, but the reporting was done by J. Wes Yoder, a freelance journalist working for the Times. The note said "the article should have carried Mr. Yoder's byline with Mr. Bragg's."
While many national correspondents at the Times rely on stringers for reporting, the paper's policy on "dateline integrity" says the bylined writer must "provide the bulk of the information, in the form of copy or, when necessary, of notes used faithfully in a rewrite," CJR reported on its Web site.
In an interview with CJR on Wednesday, Bragg said "I wouldn't have done anything different. J. Wes did great work and we came out with a great story."
Bragg won the feature-writing Pulitzer in 1996 "for his elegantly written stories about contemporary America." He came to the Times in January 1994 as a metropolitan reporter, becoming a national correspondent later that year.
And I got he credit...
Things just keep getting better and better.
I'm amazed at how much "truth" has been showing itself lately.
Don't know anything about Bragg's politics, but this is a very minor infraction compared to Blair's plagarism.
"Pinch" Sulzberger's stuffed moose collection. The green one? They don't call 'im "Pinch" for nothing.
You're right about the Bragg story. It's nothing compared to Blair's deceptions, deliberate lies, and playing the public for fools. Few truths came out of Blair's mouth, but one might be his comment about the NYT's being a snakepit.
I'm glad to see trouble for the NYT, but sorry to see that it involves Rick Bragg. His books, All Over But the Shoutin' and Ava's Man, are excellent stories about growing up poor in the South. He came along a few years later than me, but did an excellent job of catching the flavor of the poor rural south. His boyhood, growing up poor white in the south, reminded me very much of my own.
Don't know anything about Bragg's politics, but this is a very minor infraction compared to Blair's plagarism.
Who knows? They don't even know. Go figure liberals.
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