HITT JOB. TAP’s awesome new addition Ann Friedman makes a solid point about lefty journalism in her discussion of Jack Hitt‘s colossal error in his New York Times magazine piece about abortion in El Salvador, but I think I’m going to have to disagree with her conclusion that a woman would necessarily have done a better job on the story simply because she would have had better access. From what’s been reported so far, the issue wasn’t access, which Hitt had, so much as that one should never send a stylist to do a reporter’s job. There’s a sub-population of magazine writers who are pure stylists, and Hitt has increasingly become one of them, as with this dizzying Mother Jones piece on Hillary Clinton, where he piles sentences and stereotypes atop eachother with the gluttonous abandon of Marie Antoinette consuming fancy petits fours in Sofia Coppola‘s recent film. The piece was so over the top that Howard Kurtz pronounced: “Either Hitt has had the gumption to commit to glossy paper what millions of Americans have been quietly buzzing about, or he has done a triple-gainer off the high board into fantasyland.”
In my observation, there are a lot of wonderful reporters in the magazine world who are also excellent stylists, but there are very few pure stylists out there who are also very interested in real reporting, though they can be very good at scene pieces, profiles, and essays. Hitt simply didn’t do his due diligence as a reporter for the Times when tackling a serious job of political reporting about a highly controversial issue. (“The care taken in the reporting and editing of this example didn�t meet the magazine�s normal standards,” wrote Times Public Editor Byron Calame. “[O]btaining the public document isn�t difficult.”) Worth noting also is that this was Hitt’s second controversial Times magazine piece from last year. In May 2006, Editor & Publisher asked:
Did The New York Times Magazine take an idea for a feature story from an alternative newspaper, use a similar approach and format, and even borrow a headline? The Times and the author of the piece say absolutely not, but two alternative newspaper editors from Arkansas and Tennessee and writer wonder about the link, and they are not being quiet about it, calling the Times’ behavior everything from “rude” to theme-stealing….
But the most striking thing about Hitt’s piece was the title and the construct. “13 Ways of Looking at an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker,” read the title, with the layout including 13 subsections, almost mirroring Peacock’s method, if not content. Although the Hitt story does not appear to have any outright plagiarism–and obviously it’s a saga worth re-telling–its similarities to the original story have left some in Arkansas and Tennessee wondering about the overall approach…
Times magazine editor Gerald Marzorati said the Wallace Stevens takeoff is not new. “Look, the headline and organizing strategy associated with the Wallace Stevens’ poem has been around in magazines for years,” he said in an e-mail to E&P, adding that The New Yorker had published Skip Gates’s “13 Ways to Look at a Black Man” when he was there. “Which is to say that, in retrospect, we were guilty of cliche, perhaps, but not of plagiarism.”
I’ve really enjoyed Hitt’s work for the Times and other magazines in the past, but it does look like he’s been off his game recently.
–Garance Franke-Ruta