BY DAN
KENNEDY
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See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
More on the Times
meltdown. Washington Post gossip columnist
Lloyd
Grove reported this last
Wednesday. But even though Romenesko
flogged it, the departure of New York Times photographer
Edward Keating -- accused of violating journalistic ethics for
staging a photo of a gun-toting boy near Buffalo last fall -- didn't
get much attention.
Given the meltdown now under way at
the Times, Keating's alleged misdeeds should be considered
alongside those of former Times reporter Jayson Blair and
suspended Pulitzer winner Rick
Bragg, who tells the
Post today that he will quit. (Bragg, by the way, tells Howard
Kurtz that Times editors knew precisely how heavily he relied
on interns and stringers, and that he's now being made into an object
lesson. What about it, Howell Raines?)
The Keating affair dates back to
last September 20, when the Times ran a front-page photo of a
young boy aiming a toy gun, terrorist-style, in the Buffalo suburb of
Lackawanna, New York, where federal authorities were investigating an
alleged Al Qaeda sleeper cell.
According to this
piece in the Columbia
Journalism Review, several other photographers at the scene were
convinced that Keating had set it up, and persuaded their editors not
to run it when it came in over the wires. As the CJR reports,
the Times eventually ran an "Editors' Note" stating "that the
boy's gesture had not been spontaneous," and that the paper "regrets
this violation of its policy on journalistic integrity."
Keating -- who denied any
wrongdoing then, and who denies it still in an e-mail exchange with
Grove -- was suspended, and eventually left the paper. And it was
Keating who took the portrait of a cigarette-smoking Blair that
landed on the cover of Newsweek.
posted at 8:48 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
