Hard News (28 page)

The story was posted online on Sunday morning, May 18. The next day, the piece hit newsstands, with a full-page cover shot of Blair sucking on a cigarette. Blair, I found out later from a friend who lived in the area, went from newsstand to newsstand in Park Slope, Brooklyn, stocking up on copies of the issue—mementos of his moment of infamy.

It’s safe to say that Howell Raines was not nearly as excited about his time in the spotlight. I made a perfunctory call to Raines, although I suspected he wouldn’t answer. I also called Catherine Mathis and was prepared for her to be angry with the extent to which I had laid the Blair fiasco, and the anger in the
Times
’s newsroom, at Raines’s feet. To my surprise, Mathis said the story was fair.

I knew then that Howell Raines was truly in serious danger of losing his job.

—————

A
FTER MY STORY
was published, Blair agreed to speak with Sridhar Pappu, then
The New York Observer
’s media writer, whose 3,400-word article appeared on Wednesday, May 21. Blair used the opportunity to lash out at the
Times,
insult editors by name, and laugh at the paper’s troubles—all of it entirely on the record. “I don’t understand why I am the bumbling affirmative action hire when [former
New Republic
writer] Stephen Glass is this brilliant whiz kid,” Blair told Pappu. “I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism.”

On Tuesday, May 20, the same day Pappu’s interview was posted on the
Observer
’s website, Howell Raines sent out a memo in which he publicly repudiated many of the newsroom changes he had instituted during the past year. Earlier that day, Raines and Boyd had met with the paper’s masthead and department heads. During the meeting, many of the frustrations that had been brewing under the surface boiled over, and Raines capitulated across the board. Raines would, he wrote, “push authority on news coverage and staff assignments down to the department heads.” The desk heads, not the masthead, “are the managers who will have the first and most direct responsibility for running their departments and shaping their reports.” Department heads would “get heard more consistently in our hiring process.” Finally, Raines announced, Arthur Sulzberger had agreed to hire twenty new people for the newsroom. “This,” Raines wrote, “is a direct response to what so many of you said so eloquently about your work loads in last week’s [town hall] meeting.”

Raines had come into his job loudly denouncing the bottom-up management of his predecessor. He’d argued that the “silo management” that was created when desk heads were given autonomy was ruining the
Times.
And he had told Ken Auletta that he refused to be “rattled by the friction of the moment.” “You have to set your sights on a beacon that is a journalistic ideal,” Raines had said. “It’s important not to get knocked off course by those winds of criticism.” Now, Raines was being knocked dramatically off course.

But the
Times
’s—and Raines’s—saga wasn’t over yet. An ongoing internal investigation, started by an anonymous complaint a week earlier, had uncovered at least one egregious offense by Rick Bragg, one of Raines’s favorite writers on the paper. The previous June, Bragg had used an uncredited, unpaid stringer for what was essentially a puff feature on oyster fishermen in the Florida Panhandle.

The story, published on the front page of the
Times
on June 15, 2002, was titled “An Oyster and a Way of Life, Both at Risk.” The lead read:

The anchor is made from the crankshaft of a junked car, the hull is stained with bottom muck, but the big Johnson outboard motor is brand new. Chugging softly, it pushes the narrow oyster boat over Apalachicola Bay, gently intruding on the white egrets that slip like paper airplanes just overhead, and the jumping mullet that belly-flop with a sharp clap into steel-gray water.

The piece was infused with the kind of “being there” touches Raines looked for from Bragg. He described a fisherman “rhythmically stabbing at the soft sand.” He wrote about the disappearing mores of the Panhandle fishermen: “More and more, life here feels temporary. The water will change. The oystermen cannot control that, although some of them are trying.” The piece ended on this grace note: “The people have a toughness in them here. They can bear almost anything. It is only the bay that is fragile.” It was one of only three stories Bragg would write in June 2002, a time when the rest of the staff was being pushed to file three and four times per week.
^*43

As it turns out, Bragg hadn’t even done the reporting for his story. Instead, he had dispatched J. Wes Yoder, a young reporter who served as a kind of personal stringer for Bragg, to Florida to do the on-the-ground research. Yoder had spent four nights in Apalachicola, Florida, interviewing fishermen and taking notes on the river before giving his notes to Bragg. Before he filed his story, Bragg flew down to Apalachicola, got off the plane, wandered around for a couple of hours, and flew back home. In
Times
parlance, this was referred to as the “toe-touch” dateline: A reporter would do research and interviews on the phone or rely on stringers’ notes and then fly in to a city just so the story could begin with the requisite indication that it had been written from the pertinent locale. Toe-touch datelines had become increasingly popular as Raines pushed his staff to cover more and more ground. Never, however, were they used on puff feature stories. On May 23, the
Times
ran an editors’ note on the almost year-old story:

An article last June 15 described the lives and attitudes of oystermen on the Florida Gulf Coast who faced threats to their livelihood from overuse of water farther north. It carried the byline of Rick Bragg, and the dateline indicated that the reporting was done in Apalachicola.

In response to a reader’s recent letter questioning where the reporting took place, The Times has reviewed the article. It found that while Mr. Bragg indeed visited Apalachicola briefly and wrote the article, the interviewing and reporting on the scene were done by a freelance journalist, J. Wes Yoder.

The article should have carried Mr. Yoder’s byline with Mr. Bragg’s.

The editors’ note wasn’t entirely fair: Bragg had long pushed for his stringers to get credit for their work; what’s more, it was virtually unheard-of for stringers to get bylines. Still, the note caused much snickering in the
Times
’s newsroom, where Bragg, who boasted about how he operated by a different set of rules from everyone else’s, was widely reviled. For years, reporters had been keeping track of their favorite Bragg corrections. One infamous story about a small-town Alabama newspaper couple who exposed corruption by a county sheriff was riddled with errors. Bragg wrote that the sheriff’s prison sentence was twenty-seven years; it was actually twenty-seven months. The editor who was profiled was fifty-nine, not in his “late 40’s.” The circulation of the paper in question was 7,125, not 6,000. And the newspaper’s investigation—the heart of Bragg’s piece—was published
after
the sheriff had repaid county money to buy his daughter an all-terrain vehicle, not before. Another Bragg story lamenting the fact that only two Las Vegas casinos still featured showgirls had later necessitated a correction that noted that, in fact, there were other casinos that continued to feature showgirls.

Later that Friday, May 23,
Times
sources confirmed that Bragg had been suspended from the paper for two weeks. Bragg, however, wasn’t going to go down without a fight. On Monday, he gave an interview to
The Washington Post
’s Howard Kurtz. “Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants,” Bragg told Kurtz. In between quoting his own work by heart and saying he was “too mad to whine” about his suspension, Bragg said he had twice tried to quit the paper—once after a disagreement with an editor over a story—and both times Raines had intervened personally.
^*44

Kurtz had been at Los Angeles International Airport on Memorial Day when he got Bragg’s call. Kurtz had gotten married the day before and was flying back to Washington that day. “I didn’t even have a pad with me,” Kurtz says. “I’m scribbling on pieces of paper like a madman, and now my wife comes by and says they’re starting to board the plane.” On the plane, Kurtz wrote out the piece in longhand and then called from an in-flight phone and dictated it to an editor at the
Post
’s office.

Because Kurtz was writing from the air, he didn’t call anyone at the
Times
for comment on Bragg’s claims that other
Times
reporters relied on stringers and clerks to gather color for feature stories.
Times
reporters do use stringers, but the unwritten rule was that reporting help was used in situations in which a correspondent was unable to get to the scene himself, such as breaking news stories or trend pieces that relied on anecdotes from around the country. It was rare, if not unheard-of, to have stringers do the majority of reporting for color features. None of this explanation made it into Kurtz’s piece.

As soon as the
Post
story was published, the
Times
’s national correspondents waited for someone to defend their reporting methods. No one did. “I told Howell that day that he should issue something to rebut [Bragg’s accusations],” says Floyd Norris. “He said he was thinking about it.” Part of the problem was that Bragg had repeatedly told Raines that because of his ongoing health problems, he was unable to do the type of travel required for his job. Raines had assured his star reporter time and again they’d find a way to work it out. “At that point,” says Norris, “I think Howell had gone from a forceful leader who relied upon his own opinions to a man who was hesitant to take decisive action.”

On Wednesday, May 28, the paper’s reporters took matters into their own hands. That morning, Peter Kilborn, a national correspondent based in Washington, sent an e-mail to more than a dozen national staffers and the section’s two top editors. “Bragg’s comments in defense of his reportorial routines are outrageous,” he wrote. “I hope there is some way that we as correspondents, alone or with the support of the desk, can get the word out there, within The Times and outside, that we do not operate that way. Blair lies, cheats, and steals. We don’t. Bragg says he works in a poisonous atmosphere. He’s the poison.” Within minutes, the e-mail had been forwarded to me.

“I was really offended,” Kilborn said that day. “I bust my ass chasing facts and I go to weird places I’ve never been and I have to root around to get the story. The whole idea [of using stringers to do the bulk of the reporting] is anathema to decent journalism.”

In his e-mail, Kilborn also voiced some of the resentment at Raines. “In the last couple of years, especially, I’ve bitched about being pushed into corner-cutting jams,” he wrote. “However intense the heat recently because of understaffing and demands to produce, we don’t take short cuts, and we don’t fake it.”

“We’ve been understaffed on the national desk,” Kilborn said to me. “That means everybody’s got to work harder and faster when there are important developments. And there’s Bragg sitting in New Orleans and doing dick, not getting out of town. I certainly resented it.”

Within minutes, other correspondents began responding to Kilborn’s message. “The problem is we’ve had a two-tier system that has allowed Bragg to carve out one system for him (cutting corners, using a huge stringer network, telling people he can’t be edited) and another for everyone else,” wrote national correspondent Timothy Egan. “Also, it’s long been an open joke among national staffers that anything Bragg wrote . . . gets on page one, automatically, while everyone else has to earn their way out front.” Todd Purdum, based in Washington, added, “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.”

As the national correspondents were writing one another, other reporters were sending open letters to Jim Romenesko’s website, a one-stop shop for media-industry news and gossip. At 2:00 p.m., David Firestone, who had been a national correspondent in Atlanta before being moved to Washington, wrote, “The reporters that I know don’t simply beautify the notes of stringers, interns, news assistants and clerks; they take most of those notes themselves, and they take pride and pleasure in doing so. They want to see the faces of the people they interview. For Tuesday’s
Washington Post
story to present such an unchallenged picture does a disservice to an immensely talented staff of hard-working reporters.” Just before 5:00 p.m., the
Times
’s New York City Hall bureau chief, Jennifer Steinhauer, wrote: “If my colleague, Rick Bragg, feels compelled to tell any reporter who will listen that he is being punished for engaging in standard practices of stringer abuse at
The New York Times,
that is his constitutional right. But I for one am not going to sit by and let those statements go unchecked.” And at 5:15 p.m., Alex Berenson, the reporter who had asked Howell Raines at the staff-wide meeting if he was going to resign, added his thoughts. “I wish I didn’t feel the need to get caught up in this mess,” Berenson wrote to Romenesko. “But if Rick Bragg is going to impugn the reputation of every reporter at the Times, some of us are going to have to respond.”

Bragg, meanwhile, was growing more incensed, according to friends. He’d told several people close to him that immediately after his suspension, Arthur Sulzberger had called him personally and thanked him for “taking one for the team.” Now, instead of dealing with the continued vitriol of the paper’s staff, he quit.

At 7:32 that night, Howell Raines sent out a three-sentence message from Al Siegal’s e-mail account. This one was addressed “to the staff.” “Rick Bragg has offered his resignation, and I have accepted it,” Raines wrote. “We know this has been a difficult period. We have full confidence in our staff and we will be talking with you more in short order.”