Reply #128: Frankly, there's much about the practices of big newspapers

[QC]

that is sleazy, and I would count using unattributed stringers, and doing anything to get the date-line, in that category.

Has Bragg damaged his own credibility? Certainly. Does it follow that he is a lying sumbitch who can be denounced out of hand without any attention to facts or circumstances? No.

I frankly do not know what to believe about the Lynch story, and given how much we have been jerked around, I am suspicious. But I think that reducing the argument to "Rick Bragg is involved, therefore it cannot possibly be true" is simplistic.

As for the slipshod standards of the newspaper scene, let me share with you an experience of mine. I do some fact-checking for a health magazine, and a few months ago was sent a story written by a newspaper reporter who won a recent Pulitzer. Ordinarily my job just involves verifying quotes and the like, but this piece would not have passed muster in a freshman comp class. Among other things, the author, who got $5,000 for a 2500 word piece, "quoted" a man who had been dead for three years, relayed a bunch of information that has been flatly contradicted by recent (and well publicized) research, and treated corporate press releases as gospel. I had to put 35 hours into that piece, including re-researching and rewriting large parts of it, to make it publishable.

The experience made me even more skeptical of newspapers, which generally do not have fact-checkers.

As for Bragg, if you have not read All Over But the Shoutin and Ava's Man, I strongly recommend them. Extremely powerful books about the lives of the poor.