NYT in Iraq: Fudging facts, sleeping around, enjoying cappucino

Accounts of goings-on at the NYT’s Baghdad bureau get sketchier and sketchier. Aside from rampant sex and vitriolic follow-up emails, the paper’s integrity is once again suspect thanks to NYT metro reporter Alan Feuer’s upcoming book Over There: From the Bronx to Baghdad: Two Months in the Life of a Reluctant Reporter.

Apparently those two months were more like three weeks, according to the New York Observer’s Tom Scocca – and the fuzzy rendition of facts continues from there as he approximates ages (“…Mr. Feuer reproduces notes describing a source’s age as “maybe 50 55,” which becomes a definitive “50″ in his news story”), takes hopeful stabs at identifying sources (“Aruban or Arubay – what difference did it make?”) and casts light on the newsgathering habits of his coworkers:

After fudging the age and name of his two sources, T.R. [Ed. - "This Reporter," Feueur's novelized alter-ego) hangs out and observes Ian Fisher taking a stab at writing the paper's lede-all Iraq story: Mr. Feuer "watched him scan the Internet for wire reports, listened as [Feuer] toted up his own experiences, borrowed bits from [John] Kifner, stole a pinch from Reuters, staged a raid on AFP, then cobbled everything together… The premiere [sic] story in the next day’s Times was being fashioned out of wire reports and late-night recollections from exhausted correspondents.”

(Per Scocca: “A story including both bits of allegedly fudged copy – “Haidar Arubay” and “Nashet Maktouf, 50″ – appeared in The Times on April 14, 2003.” Inspired, no doubt, by a related story the day before: A NATION AT WAR: AMERICAN CASUALTIES; Plans for Families, Degrees and Careers Come to Abrupt End in Iraq, April 13, 2003).

After asking Feuer if his “recollected memories” affected his reliable reporting from Iraq, the NYT concluded that Feuer’s “recollected memories” didn’t affect his reliable reporting from Iraq. (Hey, that strategy worked out last time.)

Elsewhere in the column, Rebecca Dana addresses the controversy behind the firing of Susan Sachs, citing sources attesting to friction between Sachs and the co-workers she allegedly ratted out, Dexter Filkins and John Burns. While the newspaper staffers were evidently not getting as much action as the Fox and CNN crews, Burns is apparently “known by colleagues politely as the ambitious, virile type.”

Casting doubt/a weirder light on all this is the fact that Burns’ wife is actually in Baghdad managing staff quarters and keeping them all in comfy sheets and cappucino.

Times Iraq Flak: Feuer’s War Tale, Marital E-Mails [NYO]

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