MoDo Mails It In

I'd like a coherent explanation from the NYT on how this is any different from what got Rick Bragg fired.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/horsesmouth/2008/01/dowds.php

 

I didn't even understand the Derry dateline in the first place. Hil's shindig was in Manchester. Seemed like a CYA thing.

 

OFF WITH HER HEAD!

 

You would think the Times would have learned by now after all the credibility issues that have surfaced there. But they're still arrogant as hell, and they have still have untouchables. This isn't a blanket indictment of the Times. But they pull stuff that puts them and us in a bad light.

 

If there is a more overrated non-sports columnist working than Maureen Dowd, I don't know who it is.

She got her Pulitzer through denigrating the Clintons for being too hick-ish for Beltway-insiders like her, and man, her columns -- especially since then -- are just silly and embarrassingly juvenile.

 

I don't see how it's different from Bragg at all -- unless this was done with the knowledge of her editors and Bragg kept it on the lowdown.

Do other papers allow writers/columnists to routinely use assistants to gather much of the information for no credit at all?

 

Times has its head so far up its ass.

Learned zero from Jayson Blair.

 

I still contend that any attempt to punish, browbeat, or suspend Bragg by the Times for what he did was absurd. It wasn't kosher journalism, but it was something the Times completely endorsed and even embraced, then when the Poynter kids got wind of it and started wagging fingers, the Times left Bragg to dangle in the wind. He quit because the paper tried to make it look like he'd done something rogue on his own, instead of something that was expected of him.

If Dowd was in NH before she went to Israel, and some of that reporting made it into the column, I don't have THAT much a problem with the dateline. It's a shame, though, that her ego is large enough that she couldn't simply say "told a Times reporter" for those quotes. Frank Rich does that all the time.

 

Doesn't this happen all of the time in sports, like when a columnist, or feature writer, writes the next-day analysis of a night game? You were there, right, what's it matter where you write from?

 

That's just it. She wasn't there the night the results came in.

A sports columnist is not allowed to go to the Wednesday press conference and then write a sports column from an away game while watching at home on TV and dateline it at the location of the away game.

A dateline means the reporter is there or was there as the story happens... Not was there earlier in the week or month.

What the NYT did is wrong.

 

I see the point people are making, and while she should've credited a reporter (i guess, doesn't really change the story for me), it's not worth much arguing. In this case, she wasn't sitting at home on TV. She was working for the NY Times in Israel.

 

Yeah, but if someone gathered the quotes specifically for your story (which seems to be the case here) wouldn't you give them a "Reporter John Doe contributed to this story" or something at the end?