Most entertaining NY Times-related item(s) in—well, forever, as far as this blog is concerned—are on offer today in the NY Observer. (Much thanks to The Cunctator for the tip.) Tom Scocca reports on an upcoming book by NYT metro reporter Alan Feuer, who did a brief and apparently inglorious three-week stint as a war correspondent in Baghdad two years ago, and is telling—not all, maybe, but stuff you for sure won't get anywhere else:

The proofs of [Feuer's] book have been something of a samizdat sensation on West 43rd Street—not because of what he saw in Baghdad, but because of what he claims to have missed.

Mr. Feuer—writing in the third person—recounts in one section how he filled gaps in his handwritten notes by taking liberties with the facts: TThere was a name in the pad, Haidar something, A-R-something, Aruban or Arubay, it was impossible to tell. He bore down on the notebook and tried to sort it out. Aruban or Arubay—what difference did it make? All right, Mr. Arubay, speak some words to the readers of the Times."

Later in that passage, Mr. Feuer reproduces notes describing a source's age as "maybe 50 55," which becomes a definitive "50" in his news story.

A story including both bits of allegedly fudged copy—"Haidar Arubay" and "Nashet Maktouf, 50"—appeared in The Times on April 14, 2003.

It's impossible to tell from Scocca's account whether the book is intended to be a genuine (if inexplicable) memoir, or some sort of weird, self-destructive comic riff on journalistic fecklessness—though my money's on the latter:

The book begins with [Feuer's] third-person narrator—"T.R.", for "this reporter"—receiving his assignment in New York, and follows him through the minutiae of packing, traveling and waiting. The chapter "Welcome to Iraq" is No. 19 out of 27.

"He made his way to the elevator now with every neuron in his head on fire," Mr. Feuer writes at one point, "feeling itchy, feeling anxious—no way for a war reporter to feel, unless—forgive him, Father—he was no thing of the sort." That piece of head-spinning war-zone psychodrama takes place at the InterContinental Hotel in Amman, Jordan.

The really bizarre dimension to this, though, is that Feuer has apparently been weighed in the balance by his superiors at the Times, and found not wanting:

Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis, via e-mail, said that when the proofs of Mr. Feuer's book came out, metro editor Susan Edgerley "asked him flat out whether he was saying he had faked material in The Times, and whether he ever had. He told her he had not, and we know of no plausible assertion that he has."

In the front of the book, Mr. Feuer writes that it is "a book of recollected memory, not recorded fact." According to Ms. Mathis, the paper concluded that "T.R." is an unreliable narrator, but Mr. Feuer is a reliable reporter.  ... Mr. Feuer, reached by phone, said he hadn't received much grief about his account of fudging, "because I think it's a reality."

[Can't help thinking in this context of the Seinfeld episode where George tries, heroically but ineffectively, to get himself fired from the Yankees. What's a guy got to do to get noticed around here, spill soup on Abe Rosenthal's old fedora?] Love the way literary-critical sophisitication (the unreliable narrator) gets deployed as an ass-coverer here. And certainly, there's "no plausible assertion" that Feuer ever faked anything in his reporting, if you're prepared to discount Feuer's own assertions—but perhaps he's also an "unreliable narrator" when he's narrating to an interviewer over the phone.

Of course, there are offenses against journalistic propriety, and then there are offenses against propriety. Scocca's second item concerns the the Times Baghdad bureau and the various shenanigans therein, the struggle for power (and the struggle for a good cappucino). Alan Feuer's job may be OK (at least for now), but it's good to see there's still a line no Timesperson is allowed to cross:

Less than five months after bureau chief Susan Sachs arrived [in Baghdad] in October of 2003, she was called back to New York, overthrown in a rebellion led by entrenched Iraq correspondents John Burns and Dexter Filkins.

But last week, The Times concluded that Ms. Sachs, like a car-bombing Sunni, had mounted an insurgent action of her own in defeat. According to multiple Times sources, the paper fired her for allegedly sending missives to the wives of Mr. Burns and Mr. Filkins, accusing the reporters of marital infidelity on the front lines.

You wanna make shit up about the towelheads, that's your business—but goddamn it you don't fuck with a senior correspondent's pursuit of the nookie! (Though it seems to me that, given what the item goes on to report about Dexter Filkins's "swashbuckling loner's" penchant for packing heat, mere self-preservation would have told Sachs not to go there.)

Go read. Do they actually hire any adults at the Times?

posted by michael  2:40:43 PM  
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