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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, August 11, 2005

LEADING ACADEMICIANS AND
PROFESSIONALS AGREE



UD’s all in favor of building up your life again after you’ve taken a fall, but in the case of Rick Bragg, ex-New York Times writer and about-to-be professor of journalism at the University of Alabama , she thinks he owes it to his students to be more honest about his record at the Times than he, and his dean, have so far been.

“The issue here is that it appears that [Bragg’s] not doing any of his own reporting,” said one of the participants in a PBS discussion about big and small scandals at the Times a couple of years ago. And while this is an overstatement, Bragg does seem to have, in a rather arrogant and cynical way, farmed out the reporting of his pieces (journalists call this increasingly common practice “drive-by reporting”) to uncredited and barely paid gophers.



In the particular story that caused the Times to suspend him temporarily (Bragg eventually resigned. Only the resignation is mentioned in most of the Alabama stories.), Bragg appears to have sent a faceless stringer to Apalachicola to interview everyone and look around. Bragg dropped into town for a short spell and then wrote the story as if he’d witnessed and experienced what it described. As one commentator writes:

Bragg appears to be guilty of three counts of editorial deceit in hiring an unpaid, undisclosed, and unauthorized helper — essentially subcontracting his work to others without his bosses' consent. [He visited] Apalachicola for a couple of hours solely to claim the dateline and foster the illusion that [he’d] seen the story [himself].

The Apalachicola text reveals how Bragg infused the piece with its fraudulent sense of immediacy. He repeatedly invokes the word "here" to imply an intimacy with his subjects and the environs, even though he didn't do any of the interviews with the oystermen.



More and more, life here feels temporary. …
As in any society, there are layers here. …
A man has to get very drunk not to think about the future here. …
While environmentalists call the bay pristine, people who have lived here the longest say change has long since come. …
The people have a toughness in them here.



Obviously, the journalistic profession should better codify 1) exactly how much work a stringer must do before earning a byline credit and 2) how many minutes a reporter need occupy the city limits of his dateline in order to claim it. But the lack of a hard-and-fast standard doesn't mean I don't know journalistic scamming when I see it. Reconstituting a "you are there" story from somebody else's notes and conducting a touch-and-go landing to claim the dateline violates not only Times policy, but any sober person's elemental sense of intellectual honesty.




The same Slate writer continues:

Every reporter makes mistakes, but Bragg's gargantuan goofs defy explanation—often making you wonder if he even visited the scene of his own story. Take this hilarious extended correction for Bragg's June 1, 1998, story about a small Alabama newspaper's crusade against corruption, in which he appears to have gotten more facts wrong than right:

'An article on June 1 about a small-town Alabama publishing couple who exposed corruption by a county sheriff misstated the sentence received by the sheriff, Roger Davis of Marengo County, for extortion. It was 27 months in prison, not 27 years, and is to be served concurrently with another 27-month sentence, for soliciting a bribe and failure to pay state income taxes.

The article also misstated the age of the editor and publisher, Goodloe Sutton of the weekly Democrat-Reporter in Linden. He is 59, not in his late 40's.

In addition, the article referred imprecisely to the timing of a Democrat-Reporter article about Sheriff Davis's use of county money for an all-terrain vehicle for his daughter. That article was published after the sheriff had repaid the money, not before.

The Times article also misstated the process by which the sheriff took money from the county mental health center. He had the center write a check to him for each mental patient who was transported by sheriff's deputies; he was not cashing checks that had been intended for the center.

The article also misstated the circulation of The Democrat-Reporter. It is 7,125, not 6,000.'

Or this Page One March 14, 2002, Bragg story about a town that allegedly banned Satan:

'A front-page article on March 14 reported on a proclamation by the mayor of Inglis, Fla., population 1,400, banning Satan from the town. The mayor, Carolyn Risher, had prayers encased in posts at the entrances to the town. The article said that while the proclamation was signed by the town clerk and stamped with the official seal, other town officials had said the mayor was speaking only for herself.

The article should have added that those officials, members of Inglis's town commission, took that position in late January after the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue the city. The commission ordered the mayor to reimburse the town for the cost of issuing the proclamation and had the posts removed from public property. Officials of the civil liberties union in Florida brought the later developments to The Times's attention in a letter to the editor published on Thursday.'

Such errors cry out for public pillory — or at the very least careful policing by editors. Instead, Bragg continued to live his enchanted life at the Times.





Bragg‘s dean is brazening it out. "I did discuss it with leading academicians and professionals," Clark said. "They considered what happened in that particular situation an injustice."




Beyond importing a certain raffish approach to reporting, Bragg brings to the University of Alabama a familiar brand of garrulous Southern self-mythologizing. Katha Pollitt describes his “lavishly overwritten tales of Southern life,” which “provoked many an eyeroll from acerbic New Yorkers.”

UD, a longtime, hypertypical NYT reader, recalls thinking that Bragg’s stories functioned to reassure affluent educated easterners like her that she shouldn’t feel bad about poor Louisianans and Floridians because after all they have the deep rootedness and humble human dignity that she lacks.