Posted on 05/15/2003 4:37:19 PM PDT by terilyn
QUOTE FOR THE DAY II:
"The issue in advancing newsroom diversity is that you have to get people into gate-keeper roles. You have to force your hiring managers to find talent and demand that every pool of applicants for any job includes at least one woman and one minority." - Arthur Sulzberger Jr., on how he imposes racial preferences in every single job at the paper (except his own), August 8, 2002.
After the events of the last few days, it is apparent that the minority in question doen't have to be truthful, unless said minority is caught.
I wonder what the woman in question can get away with? What if it's a minority woman?
Too many questions about journalistic ethics...
Thanks for the ping, Howlin!
The Road to Howell...Race had everything to do with this story - and not because bigoted people chose to exploit Blair to further some hateful agenda. Rather, it's because open-minded, well-intentioned people used Blair's race to put him in a position he wasn't professionally prepared for. And in so doing, those open-minded people lent a bit of ammunition and a small sense of validation not just to hate mongers, but to those pestering, nagging thoughts about things black and white like the one that occurred to me when I first saw Jayson Blair's picture.
Nearly everything about the Blair case came about because of affirmative action, or at least from the entitlement mindset that comes with support for affirmative action. In its 7,000-word correction printed over the weekend, the Times itself admitted that Blair was originally hired with little professional experience. Metropolitan Editor Jonathan Landman told Howard Kurtz that the Times was aware of Blair's "substandard record" at the time of his hiring. Yet Blair was not only hired, he was quickly elevated through the paper's ranks (and I do mean "was elevated" - he certainly didn't elevate himself).
National Public Radio then revealed over the weekend that Times Editor Howell Raines, in a 2001 speech to the National Association of Black Journalists, held Blair up as an example of the Times' commitment to diversity, a commitment Raines then asserted was more important than its commitment to quality. Slate's Mickey Kaus points out that when Raines gave that speech, he was already aware of problems with Blair's reporting.
To sum: Jayson Blair was hired despite a substandard record, was promoted despite high correction rates, and - most unfortunately - held up as an example of a "commitment to diversity" by an editor who knew at the time that he wasn't delivering.
The result of all of these professional handouts, hand-ups, and professional mulligans? Blair eventually rose to become the Times' top-billed reporter covering the Washington, D.C. sniper case last fall. He then filed report after erroneous report from the nation's capital and its suburbs, filling the press wires and airwaves with misinformation - information that could hamper the criminal prosecution of suspects John Lee Malvo and John Mohammed, and that will almost certainly contaminate the jury pool when they go to trial.
In a grand attempt to showcase his newspaper's commitment to diversity, New York Times editor Howell Raines confirmed every affirmative action critic's worst suspicions, and he did it on a national scale, and with immediate, real-world consequences.
Most of todays blacks are smart, talented, and an asset to the companies they work for, yet the libs insist that the only way they can get hired is if you force someone to hire them to reach a certain quota?
If the NYT was really interested in "diversity" why didn't they just replace Jayson with another black? Because they believed, deep in their rotten little hearts, that Jayson was the best they could find. Jerks!
I can honestly say I don't know anybody like that either.
And to think that he got chance after chance, even after it became obvious that there was a problem, makes the NYT look worse than foolish. It makes them complicit.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.