Rantingprofs: Scandal?

Scandal!

As I mentioned, I'm reading Seth Mnookin's riveting book on the undoing of the Howell Raine's regime at the New York Times, Hard News.

And last night something caught me up short, partially because I can't believe I was so stupid to have not realized it before.

In the immediate aftermath of the Jayson Blair scandal, there was a second scandal at the Times, which led to the resignation of one of Raines' favorite reporters, Rick Bragg.

Bragg was found to have passed off a story as the product of his own reporting, based on time he spent in a small southern town, when in fact he spent only a few hours in that town (called a "toe touch dateline"), the real work having been done by an unpaid stringer.

His sins were: to have misled the reader by writing with great immediacy, so that it sounded as if he had observed everything in the piece, when in fact he was working off the notes of someone who was uncredited, to have not told his superiors at the Times that he was using the work of this other person rather than his own reporting, to therefore have led the paper to print what was in essence a misleading dateline, and (this may have been the kicker), when busted in a column by Howard Kurtz, to respond by basically saying "everyone at the Times does it." That really brought the house down, because it was seen as an incredible insult to the other reporters at the paper. (Here's a piece that nicely summarizes the charges.)

Here's an email one furious Times reporter sent to the Romanesko web site, angry at the implication that other Times reporters were using uncredited labor to do the bulk of the reporting and not crediting them. Another furious Times reporter (who specifically describes the boundaries of the proper uses of stringers by reporters) explicitly brings up Iraq, when she writes:

There is not a reporter I know here who would want his or her name on a story that was reported completely or almost completely by another person, especially when there was no good reason on earth that the author could not get to the site herself. Half the reason people are in this business is to get out in the world and report stories! [Do keep that in mind when you hear about broadcast reporters who stay in hotels and remix wire service footage.]

Rick insists that having stringers report the bulk of our stories is standard practice? That would be news to the wife and children of Chris Chivers, a reporter who spent six months camped out in northern Iraq during the war, doing his own work. Ditto for Ian Fisher, Steven Myers, John Burns and countless others who have done far more dangerous and important things for the benefit of the readers of The New York Times than hang out on an oyster boat.

And that brings me to my point. Bragg's conduct was considered a scandal. He was forced out. That was partly because he didn't inform his editors what he was doing, partly because he wasn't paying the stringer (he was paying the guys rent), and I suspect partly because of the outrage after his "everybody does it" defense. But my point is that the anger people felt at that claim indicates exactly how disreputable the practice was believed to be at the time -- you don't use a dateline unless you yourself are there, and you don't use stringers for the bulk of the actual reporting unless you give them credit.

Yet even the great John Burns says he uses Iraqi stringers in Iraq:

JOHN BURNS: Well, we're certainly not covering it in the depth and at the closeness we would like to do with our own correspondents. We do have workarounds. We do have stringers -- that's to say, Iraqi reporters that we hire in most of the major cities, who can file reports to us. We have some of our own staff members who, with considerable courage -- Iraqi staff members -- have volunteered to go into some of these conflicted areas, and we learn a good deal from that. Do we learn as much as we would like to? Absolutely not.

I certainly don't begrudge that, but I want to know if the standard for the amount of reporting done before a stringer gets credit or a byline is different in Iraq than in the States? what about the standard for the amount of time in a locale before the Western reporter can use that locale for the dateline?

I hadn't realized it before I began writing this post, but there is perhaps no more extreme example of this than Bloomberg's news service, which is running Reuters dispatches -- but putting the names of their correspondents (in London) on them. Needless to say, Reuters is not happy.

Here's a Guardian reporter who's giving his stringer a byline (which seems appropriate since it's the stringer who's going to the locales.) The Post admitted they were relying on their Iraqi employees for reporting (and that this was impacting the quality of their reporting) before they began giving them credit. But they now admit how heavily they have to rely on them.

My point is this: the Rick Bragg scandal was a collection of sins, but the biggest was that he was passing off someone else's reporting as his own when he wrote up the story and misleading the reader into believing he had been somewhere he hadn't been. Now, that second item was a technical question for newspaper people because of the dateline. But if the dateline is still Baghdad, but the story is all about events in Mosul, is the reader any less misled, realistically, that the reporter was not him or herself there in Mosul doing the reporting, seeing the events? How many readers check datelines before they read a story?

If what is considered scandalous is sending someone else out to gather the facts, then writing them up nicely and neatly because you're a better writer than the person who was actually there as your eyes and ears, and you're the person who has credibility with the reader, but not telling the reader that this is the situation, so that the person without earned credibility is essentially borrowing the credibility of the person who writes well, then why isn't what's going on in Iraq today, in one outlet after another, just as bad as what happened with Rick Bragg, but with the editors' blessings and facilitation?

Is the difference simply the fact that Bragg could have gone and seen the oystermen but chose not to, while the reporters in Iraq legimately can't go to the insecure parts of Iraq? Or is the difference one of degree -- the percentage of facts in each story gathered by someone other than the reporter whose name goes on it in the end?

Why isn't what matters whether or not the reader is led to believe, in the end, that the person whose name appears on the piece the person who went out and gathered the facts the person who can personally vouch for them?

If outlets do not make clear that other people besides the writer are responsible for the gathering of the information, why aren't they as guilty of as grievous a sin as Rick Bragg was?

If you publish a piece over the name of an American reporter, you suggest that reporter is vouching for the information in the piece, and if an Iraqi stringer gathered the information you can't do that.

If you use Iraqi stringers, credit Iraqi stringers, and if they don't want their names used for security purposes, give them nom de guerres.

To be clear, I have no doubt that what Rick Bragg did was qualitatively worse -- he could have gone out and seen the oystermen.

But it is the reaction of other journalists themselves to what Bragg did that makes clear to us that there is no question that our reaction to the way they are handling the necessity of their situation in Iraq today is wrong.

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

Posted by: |

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Your comment could not be posted. Error type:

Your comment has been posted. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Rantingprofs

About

blogroll

From Iraq

Please Donate!

Consider Supporting

Recommended Books

News & Views

Search

Archives

March 15, 2005

Scandal?

TrackBack

Comments

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

Post a comment