Well - at least some of them. Read for yourself:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/national/11PAPE.html

and Safire's comment on it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/12/opinion/12SAFI.html

I think this is pretty bad.

I am afraid it shows what political correctness and fear of litigation can do. If the reporter had been young and white, he would have been summarily fired long ago. What troubles me (and my wife who, like me, reads the NYT every day) is that responsible editors - who had known for a long time that Blair's stories were suspect - just let this pass. And now the question we must all ask: are there other Blairs on the staff of the NYT? radleyp

The New York Times has suspended Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Rick Bragg for two weeks, the Columbia Journalism Review reported, the same day the newspaper published an editor's note about his handling of a feature story about Florida oystermen. The note said that while Bragg wrote the June 15 article and visited the Gulf Coast town where it originated, interviewing and other reporting at the scene were done by a freelance journalist working for the newspaper. The note did not make it clear whether Bragg's editors had known the role of the freelancer at the time.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030524/ap_on_re_us/ny_times_suspension_3