Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe NEW YORK, June 2 (UPI) -- Is the New York Times masochistic or what? In less than a month they've lost two Pulitzer Prize Advertisement winners -- a reporter demonized for relying too extensively on his intern, and an editor demonized for letting himself be bamboozled by Jayson Blair. But the real story was that the Gray Lady has started to look like the Dragon Lady. The place is ravenous for executions, seeming to self-destruct Soviet-style, with accusations and denunciations and calls for repentance and re- education and public confessions that all amount to, "Yes, we have sinned." Perhaps the better analogy is a Puritan village where suddenly it's discovered that a dozen people are failing to observe the Sabbath. Is the pillory enough, or is it to time to formally cast out demons and execute witches? At The Times, the Advertisement pillory wasn't enough. Any day now I expect The Times owners to request that the city rename Times Square. "We are not worthy," they will say. Perhaps we could sentence them to a year of punishment by re- christening their neighborhood Blair Square. It would have the advantage of spicing up the double-decker bus tours, most of which don't even bother to drive by The Times building. "On your left, the newspaper building where Jayson Blair dispensed cocaine and pretended to be coming back from the airport." But what's really going on here? With the two top editors resigning -- Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd -- there obviously had to have been some simmering discontent and major-league grudges long before Jayson Blair invented cell-phone ghost-reporting. How else do you explain, for example, the vilification of Rick Bragg? Bragg is the Pulitzer Prize winner drummed off the staff (he resigned under pressure) after some sort of Accuracy Politburo dredged up a story that was a year old and said, "Aha! You said you were on an oyster boat in Florida, but actually your INTERN was on that boat! And you didn't REVEAL THAT IN PRINT!" And suddenly it's no longer "the Jayson Blair scandal" but "the Advertisement Blair/Bragg scandal." It's like putting David Duke and Trent Lott in the same category. One defendant is covered in blood, the other has cracker crumbs on his shoes -- but, by God, it's the same basic crime! Let's put L'Affaire Bragg in perspective here. We have a term among my Texas colleagues called "collecting caliche dust." Caliche dust (pronounced ka-LEECH-ie) is an ochre scrim that, in certain parts of Texas, settles on every square inch of a town's surface. It coats the roads, clouds the barber shop windows, and hides under the lapels of your soggy suit. Collecting caliche dust, as a reporter, means recording so many tiny sensory details that a story comes to life because you've accurately described someone's haircut, or shoes, or the way the moon hangs over an abandoned barn. It's the textual grit of the story, and is appreciated mostly by fellow writers, who say, "Good caliche dust on the bank robbery. The dent in the getaway car was sweet." One example. The legendary Texas writer Gary Cartwright is the acknowledged king of caliche dust. While in Las Vegas covering the Ted Binion murder trial, he scored the ultimate Advertisement caliche-dust detail. Sandy Murphy, Binion's live-in girlfriend, was accused of killing Binion along with her new lover Rick Tabish. During the trial Murphy was under house arrest and ordered to wear one of those clumsy ankle devices that would alert police if she ventured more than 150 feet from her house. Cartwright noted that, when Murphy appeared in court, the device was a different color each time. She had painted it to match her toenails. That's what we call world-class caliche dust-- idiosyncratic physical details that illuminate a story. Rick Bragg was accused of not collecting his own caliche dust. He didn't go out on the oyster boat. He sent his intern instead. I've done the same thing. Once, at the Cannes Film Festival, I paid a guy fifty bucks to write down what people were wearing at a party I was unable to crash. I've also used editorial assistants to make phone calls to characters in a story and describe to me their demeanors. The reason I sometimes do this is that caliche-dust is time-consuming. I've sat through three-hour interviews in which the person being interviewed thinks I'm hanging on his every word, when in fact I'm writing down synonyms for the crook of his nose or the way his eyes wince Advertisement when he makes a point. In the cases where I can get someone else to do it, I do. Sometimes you're better off doing more substantive reporting and letting someone else handle the caliche. And that's what Rick Bragg did. The intern, by the way, was not employed by The Times. He was Bragg's personal assistant, working for the summer in return for a rent-free apartment and meals. Which is what interns do -- they work for the experience of working. And Bragg paid him out of his own pocket. Once I was interviewed by Connie Chung. I've never met Connie Chung or been in the same room with her. A segment producer asked me questions in Dallas, and later on they filmed Connie in New York asking the same questions. And they say Rick Bragg is lazy? Connie Chung electronically paints herself into places where she's never ventured, and it's considered just part of the game. Bragg, on the other hand, was working that day-- reporting other aspects of the story from Fort Walton Beach while the intern was in Apalachicola. Anyway, I'm going into this in some detail in order to make the following point: Advertisement An organization that would lump together what Jayson Blair did with what Rick Bragg did is in the grip of some kind of blaming frenzy. (I guess I should also mention the columnist Maureen Dowd, who was forced to atone for a presidential quote that she allegedly took out of context -- something that never would have been noticed pre-Blair.) Fortuitously, we have some idea of why the aggressive blaming might be happening, thanks to the New York Observer, which has been all over the Times story. Sridhar Pappu, who writes the excellent "Off the Record" media column for the Observer, obtained the draft of an in-house petition in which a dozen or so "young reporters" listed their grievances. They think there's favoritism in the newsroom. They think that when a job opening comes along, they don't always get a chance to apply for it. And then they have a laundry list of things they think the paper needs, including formal mentoring programs, writing coaches, "career development employees" (no clue), and -- this is my favorite one -- journalism classes outside the newsroom. Yes, there are reporters at The New York Times who believe they need to go to journalism class. Advertisement It's worse than I thought. What kind of managing editor would hire someone who thinks he needs journalism class? I believe the common advice is, "Please go to the Akron Beacon- Journal for five years and call me when you're ready." (Actually, that's an unfair slap at a fine newspaper. Some of these guys wouldn't pass muster at the Akron Beacon-Journal.) If there are all these people at The Times who feel they need mentors, and career development plans, and writing coaches (!), then how can you send them to cover City Hall? They can't even network enough to figure out the company's job openings. They don't have enough charm to find their own mentor, so how are they going to charm the mayor's press secretary? As for journalism classes outside the newsroom -- yes, that's an excellent idea. Please go back to school so you won't be in the way. What this sounds like is plain old novice envy. Newspapers always have disgruntled drones. The whole history of American journalism, starting with the New York papers that pre-date The Times, is about extremely young people being given a chance to show their abilities and climb the ladder. The drone becomes a Advertisement worker bee, and the worker bee becomes a killer bee, and the killer bee becomes an editor. That's the way it's worked since time immemorial, because newspapering is an art form, not a factory system that rewards showing up on time. But apparently the various investigative committees and management teams at The Times that have been set up to deal with Blair/Bragg/Dowd are quite happy to be turning themselves into a government-style bureaucracy based on some kind of civil service grading system. Early reports are that they'll institute some kind of incredibly fair, incredibly well-justified, incredibly monitored, incredibly accountable system of employee justice, and then those pesky Pulitzer Prize winners like Bragg and Raines and Dowd won't be able to go off on their own and do things like ... win Pulitzer Prizes. The Times will scrutinize every expense account, bird-dog every reporter's movements, and second-guess every story that doesn't seem to be backed up with the canonical two sources, an eyewitness, and verification that the Timesman was in his proper place. And once it's set up that way, the Times will be a safer place -- for the untalented and the mediocre. After all, it's time their hopes and dreams were taken seriously. Advertisement * John Bloom writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his Web site at joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.
