Free Republic

6pmLeaked emails add to NY Times' woes Ciar ByrneThursday May 29, 2003The GuardianCan the headlines get any worse for the New York Times? Once a beacon of US broadsheet journalism, the Times has already been rocked by charges of plagiarism, and now its rival the Washington Post has heaped on fresh embarrassment by reporting an unseemly squabble between two senior journalists on the paper.According to leaked emails seen by the Washington Post, the Times' Pulitzer prize-winning Baghdad bureau chief, John Burns, was in high dudgeon when another Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, Judith Miller, filed an interview with Iraqi exile leader Ahmed...

To: xxxxx@nytimes.com From: Adam Clymer (xxxx@nytimes.com) Subject: The Times Colleagues, I think it's time to take a deep breath and think about the New York Times. I share your contempt for Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg. And I share your anger at some of the failures of management that enabled them. I agree with a lot of what Times people have told outside reporters, either directly or in internal E-mails that have quickly found their way to the Internet. In particular, Peter Kilborn made the case against Bragg's excuses with telling effect. But I think by now we have hit...

May 31, 2003 Powell Defends Information He Used to Justify Iraq WarBy JAMES DAO and THOM SHANKER ASHINGTON, May 30 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell today fiercely defended the intelligence used by the Bush administration to justify war against Iraq, saying he spent several late nights poring over the Central Intelligence Agency's reports because he knew the credibility of the country and the president were at stake.The C.I.A.'s prewar assessments have been sharply questioned by some intelligence officials and lawmakers in recent days, as American forces have uncovered only limited evidence of unconventional weapons programs and Iraqi...

AS THIS MAGAZINE goes to press, a controversy swirls about the head of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. He is alleged to have "revealed," in an interview with writer Sam Tanenhaus for the Manhattan celebrity/fashion glossy Vanity Fair, that the Bush administration's asserted casus belli for war against Saddam Hussein--the dictator's weapons-of-mass-destruction program--was little more than a propaganda device, a piece of self-conscious and insincere political manipulation. Lazy reporters have been following the lead of the press release Vanity Fair publicists circulated about their "scoop." It begins as follows: Contradicting the Bush administration, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz tells...

Japan's Takenaka Mulls Official Protest Of NY Times-KyodoDOW JONES NEWSWIRESNEW YORK -- Financial Services Minister Heizo Takenaka said Thursday he is considering lodging an official protest against the New York Times Co. (NYT) over a report that he plans to leave government service as early as September to return to the world of academia, the Kyodo news agency reported.The report is "totally nonsense," Takenaka told the House of Councillors' Financial Affairs Committee. "I'm considering lodging an official protest (with the paper) through a lawyer," Kyodo reported.He said the report could undermine confidence in a key government policy that is enabling...

BLAIR, BRAGG, DOWD ... KRUGMAN?Posted by Donald Luskin at 2:26 AM May 30, 2003I noticed that the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities was referred to as "a liberal group" in a New York Times article today (natch, the article was about something supposedly terribly wrong with President Bush's tax cuts). Is this something new for the post-Jayson Blair era? Nothing will ever stop the Times from being a mouthpiece for liberal advocacy groups, and reporting their opinions as news -- but perhaps at least the Times will now have the decency to disclose the political orientation of the source....

T H E   G A L L U P   O R G A N I Z A T I O N SOURCE: http://www.gallup.com CONTACT INFORMATION: Customer Service301 South 68th Street PlaceLincoln, NE 68510 1-888-274-5447       POLL ANALYSES May 30, 2003 Public Remains Skeptical of News Media Majority of Americans believe news organizations often get facts wrong by Mark Gillespie GALLUP NEWS SERVICE PRINCETON, NJ -- Jayson Blair's reporting will be discussed for years to come in the nation's journalism schools -- as an example of how not to be a reporter. Blair resigned under pressure...

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- As scandal at the New York Times raged to the forefront of the American consciousness two weeks ago, a group of activists affiliated with the Free Republic network and the Accuracy In Media watchdog group took matters into their own hands. In a rally held outside the New York Times bureau in Washington, DC on May 15th, activists called for the firing of Times executive editor Howell Raines as a "first step toward establishing the credibility of the newspaper." In an interview with Talon News Kristinn Taylor, co-leader of the Washington, DC Chapter of the Free...

<p>May 30, 2003 -- New York Times editors have made yet another appeal to appease its angry and scandal-weary staffers - this time about the use of freelancers.</p> <p>A memo yesterday from Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd said the paper is going to sort out its policy on the use of freelancers, but didn't say exactly what that would entail.</p>

"I'm tired of cowering and rubbing my forehead"5/29/2003 11:02:18 AMFrom LISA SUHAY:I can understand the upset felt by New York Times staff writers who feel their image has been tarnished by Rick Bragg's use of an intern's material and the resulting presumption that staffers do not do their own work. I can understand it only if they are able to cast this stone in the firm knowledge that they themselves have never once used the work of another who did not receive credit. It is interesting that the people I know who actually do the invisible reporting (stringing/legs work) have a completely different...

US paper gripped by new crisis of ethicsAnother New York Times reporter forced to resign amidSuzanne Goldenberg in WashingtonFriday May 30, 2003The GuardianThe spectacle of a publishing institution in crisis moved to a second act yesterday after the bitter departure of a star writer from the New York Times. Rick Bragg, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his evocative features from the southern US, resigned on Wednesday night, days after the newspaper suspended him (with pay) and admitted that an unpaid assistant had done virtually all of the reporting for a story on oyster fishers in Florida for which Bragg...

SHOCK WAVES May 28, 2003 The controversy over former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair's plagiarized and fabricated stories has caused upheaval within the paper and has reverberated in newsrooms across the country. [Editor's Note: This discussion aired before Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent Rick Bragg officially resigned from The New York Times Wednesday night over a dispute concerning his crediting methods.] The NewsHour Media Unit is funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts   Online NewsHour:Media WatchMay 12, 2003: In the wake of the New York Times' trouble with plagiarism, Terence Smith reports on how newspapers can...

Liberal attitudes unite Jayson Blair, NYT Eric CzarnikSouth End Columnist    What is black and white and "read" all over?    The punch line to this old riddle is, of course, a newspaper. But for the New York Times, the last few weeks have made it's staff and editors "read" with shame.    Formerly one of the world's most respected newspapers, the Times has been under siege since it was discovered that a certain young, black reporter named Jayson Blair repeatedly lied, fabricated descriptions and made errors in his stories.    Blair, who was assigned top stories like the Beltway...

5/30/03 Maureen Dowd not wanted hereBy MARC R. MASFERRER The New York Times' considerable credibility problem is now our problem, as well. But unlike the Times, which has been engaged in a torturous exercise of naval gazing and self-flagellation, with its accustomed arrogance, since it was revealed that one of its younger reporters had committed all sorts of journalistic sins, we are doing something about it, and fast. Until she explains to our satisfaction her own ethical transgression -- an apparently deliberate distortion of a comment by President Bush &#8212; you will not find the work of Times columnist Maureen...

MAY 27--Yes, we've also had enough of this Jayson Blair punk. But TSG thought it was our duty to note what appears--to date, at least--to be the disgraced journalist's first piece of plagiarism. His victim? Jayson Blair. Seems that when he was a student at the University of Maryland in 1999, Blair tried his hand at poetry, posting three works on his student web site (which remains, at this writing, on one of the school's web servers). In the awful "ka-lei-do-scope in brown eyes," which you'll find below, Blair writes about some gal with "burnt sienna eyes," brown orbs that...

<p>When I heard about Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who was fired for fabricating details of stories, including pretending to be places he'd never been, my first thought was: "This'll happen again."</p> <p>In fact, I bet it's happening right now. Another wager: I bet it won't be caught. Media organizations are just not set up to deal with information fraud.</p>

<p>May 29, 2003 -- The turmoil at the New York Times took another victim yesterday when Pulitzer-winning reporter Rick Bragg quit under fire.</p> <p>"Staying on only would have caused more division," Bragg told The Post.</p> <p>"I had hoped I could stay on a bit longer, but there is too much tension and I am tired," said Bragg, who is based in New Orleans and is a friend of the Times' executive editor, Howell Raines.</p>

chatterboxChatterbox Exonerates New York Times!Does Howell Raines' Times weight polls to favor Democrats? Nope.By Timothy NoahPosted Wednesday, May 28, 2003, at 7:17 PM PT In his forthcoming book, Off With Their Heads, Dick Morris levels the sensational accusation that the New York Times has been rigging its national polls in order to favor Democrats. The attack is well-timed, coming as it does when the Times is already reeling from the Jayson Blair affair and the suspension and subsequent resignation of star prose jock Rick Bragg. Like many others, Morris is convinced that Howell Raines is ruining the New York Times,...

press boxRick Bragg's Lousy AlibiThe suspended New York Times reporter insists - wrongly - that everybody does it.By Jack ShaferPosted Tuesday, May 27, 2003, at 4:27 PM PT On Friday, New York Times reporter Rick Bragg insisted to the Columbia Journalism Review he'd done nothing wrong in claiming 1) the byline for a story that an unpaid free-lancer had reported for him and 2) the dateline "Apalachicola, Fla.," after visiting the town only briefly. (See "Rick Bragg's 'Dateline Toe-Touch.' ") "I wouldn't have done anything different," Bragg tells CJR.Bragg reiterates that position to the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz again today...

NEW YORK - Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Rick Bragg resigned from The New York Times on Wednesday after the newspaper suspended him over a story that carried his byline but was reported largely by a freelancer. The resignation comes as the Times tries to rebound from a scandal in which the newspaper found fraud, plagiarism and inaccuracies in 36 of 73 recent articles written by reporter Jayson Blair. Bragg, who had blamed his suspension on what he called a "torturous atmosphere" at the newspaper since Blair's May 1 resignation, said he offered his resignation Wednesday evening. Executive Editor Howell Raines said...