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Jayson Blair Was Wrong, But He Had Accomplices By Michael King A New Visions Commentary paper published July 2003 by The National Center for Public Policy Research, 777 North Capitol Street NE #803, Washington, D.C. 20002, 202/371-1400, Fax 202/408-7773, E-Mail Project21@nationalcenter.org, Web http://www.project21.org. Reprints permitted provided source is credited. Fallout from the Jayson Blair controversy continues at the New York Times. The top editors were forced to resign. A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter resigned over criticism that he relied too much on stringers to produce his articles. The newsroom is in shock. Former Times reporter Jayson Blair was wrong in what...

Not long after I graduated from college, I went to work at the Times as a copyboy, or, in more enlightened terms, copy person. The job title was left over from the days of typewriters, when stories were filed on sheaves of carbon paper known as ten-part books, but by the time I got to the newsroom, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, the process had been computerized, and copy persons mostly just answered the phones and sorted the mail. Whenever we could, we shirked these responsibilities to write our own stories, which were usually printed, without a byline, deep inside the Sunday...

They are blaming the drop of their stock price and their anticipated second quarter earnings on everything from a weak economy, to the effect of political instability and SARS on hotel and travel advertising, but the publishers of the New York Times failed to say a word about the effect the Jayson Blair scandal may have had on their economic health. According to the Wall Street Journal, Times stock fell Wednesday by $2.91 cents to $45.63 - a drop of 6 percent. Moreover, while analysts expected the Times' second quarter earnings to reach .54 cents per share, the Times has...

Anyone familiar with the New York Times' bias against men was not surprised by the Jayson Blair scandal, in which the reporter blatantly falsified stories for years. The Times is notorious for pitching gender feminism in slanted, one-sided reports. The systemic dishonesty exhibited by the Blair scandal was not an isolated incident. When it comes to coverage of men, it seems to be policy at the Gray Lady. continued...

Ending Raines's reign An ethics crisis at The New York Times reveals that influential weblogs now have a seat at the editorial table: at first, they could take credit for tipping journalists; now they're toppling themBy the EditorsTwo new words have entered the English language and redefined the way American media work: blog and blogosphere. Blog is short for weblog, an Internet journal written by an individual or a small group, often with links to relevant articles. The blogosphere describes the new universe of discourse in which individual pundits or cranks can gain a broad following without going through...

"The Perfect Country and Western Song"A lot of things happened last week that might seem worthy of discussion. Martha Stewart got indicted. Sam Waksal of ImClone was sentenced to seven years in jail (this week). The naughty bits of Hillary Clinton's autobiography leaked out a week early. Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd resigned from the New York Times. And the Israelis and Palestinians took tentative steps toward a hint of a beginning of peace. But there was another story last week of greater truth and enduring importance. Country Music Television (CMT) announced the top 100 country songs of all time....

The decision last week by New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to ask for the resignation of executive editor Howell Raines in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal will likely go down as one of the larger mistakes in The Times’ history. Mr. Raines’ acquiescence in his own departure was likewise a hasty move which will bring little benefit to himself or the newspaper he ran for nearly two years. That a man so utterly devoid of ethics as Jayson Blair was allowed to operate and prosper at The Times is shocking, and cause for severe internal examination....

At the height of the Jayson Blair Affair, Bill Clinton tried to help New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines. According to a report first published by my Daily News colleague Paul D. Colford, the former President contacted Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and told him that resignation was too harsh a penalty for Raines. Raines, like Clinton, is a Southern liberal of a certain age. Despite their similarities (some say because of them) the Raines-run editorial page of The Times was very tough on Clinton, especially during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. So why did the former President intervene on...

Mountains of newsprint, airtime, and Internet screenage have been expended on the recent embarrassments at The New York Times—the coming to light of massive fabrication and plagiarism by a young reporter, Jayson Blair, as well as professional slippages elsewhere on the prestigious paper's staff. Last week, with the newsroom in incipient revolt over the ethical lapses, the paper's two top news generals—executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd—were compelled to resign, after a regnum of only 21 months—the shortest rise and fall in the paper's century-plus history. It's a big story for journalists—since it reflects on all of...

When Howell Raines was editorial page editor of The New York Times, he notably did not call for Bill Clinton's resignation over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Now, Clinton may have returned the favor. The former president contacted Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to argue that Raines' resignation as executive editor was too severe a response to what happened at the paper, according to sources. Sulzberger declined to comment yesterday through a spokeswoman. Raines resigned Thursday, capping weeks of upheaval that began with disclosure of ex-reporter Jayson Blair's plagiarism and fabrications. The revelations quickly led to a referendum of sorts on...

NEW YORK -- We should have seen it coming. In fact, with 20/20 hindsight, we did see it coming. Howell Raines' downfall came suddenly, but hints that this could happen go back even before he occupied the executive editor's office at The New York Times. More than a year ago, for example, Alex S. Jones, in E&P, wrote of Raines: "His high expectations and bursting ambition scare some people at the Times. They're afraid of him. ... His empowerment of the paper's assistant managing editors has promoted muttering among the various desks that their authority has been undermined, in favor...

<p>The resignation of New York Times editors Gerald Boyd and Howell Raines ("Raines' Hard Fall," Editorial, June 6) should be just the first in a long line of resignations or dismissals at the Times. The Blair/Bragg/Dowd episodes are just a sympton of a disease that has plauged the paper since Mr. Sulzberger became the chairman and publisher. Leftist and even anti-American reporting, disguised as objective, by such people as Adam Clymer and R.W. Apple, have no place on the front pages of the pre-eminent newspaper in America. Michael B. Stefura Hoboken, N.J.</p>

The New Republic, at its best, offers pieces of observation such as “idiocy watch” whereby the reader is amused by the stupidity of the scions of pop who offer moronic opinions about 9/11 such as it being a magnificent artistic statement or that Osama Bin Laden would not be so violent if we could just get him in touch with his true loving nature [sic]. At its worst, it produces articles like Michelle Cottle´s Guilty Verdict about the Jayson Blair imbroglio at the New York Times. Her piece is valuable because it offers us an inside glimpse of the theory...

Editor falls to bloggers’ rapid poison Sarah Baxter, New York THE New York Times boasts on its masthead that it contains “all the news that’s fit to print”, but the internet is challenging its pre-eminence as a provider of news and opinion in America. A proliferating band of independent writers known as “bloggers” (short for web loggers) is pumping out personal takes on the news, and one of the most persistent themes of their websites has been that Howell Raines, executive editor of The New York Times, would have to resign or be sacked. The bloggers got their man last...

But, said Jane Eisner in the Philadelphia Inquirer, it was no time for gloating. "Even if the departures [of the editors] were necessary - and certainly they were - this is a heartbreaking development." The Los Angeles Times agreed, saying "commentators who once relied on the paper as the virtual 'gold standard' of information suddenly wondered whether the Times could restore its lofty reputation". "The move is expected to intensify the self-scrutiny already prompted in newsrooms across the country," said the Christian Science Monitor, "but it is rare for an editor to take responsibility for failings on his watch." In...

<p>June 7, 2003 -- New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has also been damaged in the Jayson Blair scandal — and industry observers are increasingly wondering whether he'll survive, and for how long.</p> <p>Before top editor Howell Raines quit, "Pinch" Sulzberger reportedly described Raines as being on probation; now it looks more like Sulzberger himself is on probation — both with his family and his roiling newsroom.</p>

<p>How right John Podhoretz is ("The Crisis Isn't Over," Opinion, June 6), and what a disingenuous editorial the Times printed — as if the Jayson Blair scandal was the reason the editors "resigned." And as to Raines' remark regarding The Washington Times, calling it a "journalistic entity," well, how coincidental that such is the term that Yasser Arafat and the Arabs once used for Israel — "the Zionist entity." And we all know how the left worships the Palestinians as victims and denigrates the state of Israel.</p>

"You ought to work for The New York Times" used to be high praise for a journalist. Now it's an attack on your credibility. And that, in the end, is why Times editor Howell Raines had to resign. The proudest masthead in journalism has been reduced to a punch line, and the responsibility fell properly on Raines and his managing editor, Gerald Boyd... Politicians, I hear, used to have the same understanding. Well, no longer, for them or for us. Journalism Web sites -- many of them accessible to the public -- have opened things up, and intense competition among...

Everyone has a different explanation of why Howell Raines was fired - oops, decided to resign - as executive editor of The New York Times. Mine is democratization of the media. In the old days, The Times not only set the agenda for the nation's news media, as it still does now, it also had enough power to insulate the paper from meaningful criticism. Nobody wanted to make an enemy of the paper that could harm your career, make sure your book didn't get reviewed, see that your daughter's wedding announcement went unmentioned and, perhaps, make sure you died without...

If anyone ever needed to measure the dedication of The New York Times's employees to this newspaper, the level of anguish generated by the Jayson Blair incident is a pretty good standard. The discovery that one young reporter had faked or plagiarized a large number of articles drew extensive news coverage, but the publicity outside the paper paled next to the anger and soul-searching within. This week, Howell Raines, the executive editor, and Gerald Boyd, the managing editor, decided that the backwash from the Blair affair was keeping them from providing the effective leadership The Times needs. Yesterday, they resigned....

The Krugman Truth Squad is going to talk about more than Paul Krugman today, even though his op-ed in this morning's New York Times offers more than the usual number of juicy opportunities for hilarious lie-busting. As you know, there's been a key development in the battle against liberal bias in the media — what I call "the conspiracy to keep you poor and stupid." The conspiracy was dealt a severe blow Thursday when Howell Raines resigned from the Times. (Raines, the paper's executive editor, was the man who hired Paul Krugman in the first place.) The proximate cause of...

<p>June 6, 2003 -- The Gray Lady's two top newsmen collapsed under the pressure of the Jayson Blair scandal yesterday, resigning from their positions at the head of the nation's "paper of record."</p> <p>The departure of New York Times executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd was announced in an emotional newsroom meeting at which publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. also said former Times editor Joseph Lelyveld will take over in the interim.</p>

<p>The problem with The New York Times isn't that tyro reporter Jayson Blair made stuff up. Or that Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter Rick Bragg didn't properly credit other reporters for their work under his byline. Or even that Howell Raines, the executive editor who quit yesterday, wasn't nice to people and played favorites and lost the confidence of his newsroom.</p>

<p>June 6, 2003 -- The unprecedented resignations of The New York Times' top two editors yesterday may have been inevitable, but they were no less stunning.</p> <p>Question is, do those who run the Times truly understand all of the reasons that brought about this astounding turn of events?</p>

<p>The two top editors of the New York Times resigned yesterday, felled by a newsroom scandal that was magnified to crisis and public humiliation by five weeks of relentless coverage in print and broadcast media.</p> <p>Howell Raines, the executive editor, and Gerald M. Boyd, the managing editor, left the paper before noon. Times officials quickly announced that Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor, had come out of retirement to serve as a single, interim leader.</p>

In the end, Howell Raines sowed the seeds of his self-destruction with a bruising management style that left him with few allies in his hour of crisis. His relentless drive and determination, great strengths in an editor, also alienated wide swaths of the New York Times newsroom, as people felt excluded and in many cases shoved aside by his autocratic rule. "If people had voted in April, long before Jayson Blair, he would have lost that vote," a Times reporter said yesterday after Raines's resignation. "I just don't think he built much support for his regime. He never built a...

June 6, 2003 Times's 2 Top Editors Resign After Furor on Writer's FraudBy JACQUES STEINBERG owell Raines and Gerald M. Boyd, the top-ranking editors of The New York Times, resigned yesterday morning, five weeks after the resignation of a reporter set off a chain of events that exposed fissures in the management and morale of the newsroom. Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesHowell Raines, left, announced his resignation in the newsroom yesterday, with Arthur Sulzberger Jr., center, and Gerald M. Boyd, right, in suit. In a hastily arranged gathering in the newsroom on the third floor, the newspaper's publisher, Arthur...

The New York Times, which has been under fire recently for the Jayson Blair scandal and also for left-biased reporting, has announced the resignation of its controversial executive editor and its managing editor. Here's the report from the NewsMax.com website, reprinted by permission. NewsMax.com - New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, caught up in the paper's recent scandals, have resigned, the corporation said today. "This is a day that breaks my heart," Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. told employees this morning. ''Mean-Spirited'' Even before getting caught up in the uproar over the publishing of fictional...

Editor's note: Just a few hours after this column was published, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd resigned from their positions at The New York Times. The New York Times Corporation has long been a different kind of media enterprise. Just as there are two classes of NYT stock, there are two classes of companies that comprise the whole. In a class by itself is The New York Times newspaper. It is the raison d'etre of the larger enterprise. Everything else falls into the general category of "cash cow," there to feed 43rd Street. Much of the managerial dysfunction of The...

<p>NEW YORK (AP) _ Here is the full text of New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger's memo to the staff this morning.</p> <p>As you can see from the attached press release, this morning I accepted the resignations of Howell Raines, our executive editor, and Gerald Boyd, our managing editor. Both Howell and Gerald have made enormous and lasting contributions to The Times over their long and distinguished careers. Given the events of the last month, however, Howell and Gerald concluded that it was best for The Times that they step down. With great sadness, I agreed with their decision. Joe Lelyveld will return to serve as interim executive editor until the selection of new executive and managing editors is made. Since most of you know Joe, you'll understand why we can all be confident that during this interim period the immediate responsibility for the quality of our journalism will be in very good hands.</p>

Howell Raines and Gerald M. Boyd, the two top-ranking editors of The New York Times, resigned this morning, five weeks to the day after the resignation of a wayward reporter named Jayson Blair set off a rapid chain of events that exposed deep fissures in the management and morale of the newsroom they had led for just under two years. In a hastily arranged ceremony in the third-floor newsroom, on the same spot where the paper had celebrated winning a record seven Pulitzer prizes just 14 months ago, the newspaper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., told staff members that he wanted...

Just announced by Fox News. Raines and Boyd have resigned from the NY Slimes.

Just reported by Bloomberg News

Had the Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg debacles happened on Joseph Lelyveld's watch instead of Howell Raines', would I be writing a column predicting Lelyveld's imminent departure from the executive editorship of the New York Times? I doubt it. When Lelyveld ran the paper from 1994 to 2001, he held great political stock in reserve and could call upon it in a time of crisis like the one currently muddying the paper. When the Times overplayed the Wen Ho Lee espionage story in 1999, nobody attributed its errors in judgment to Lelyveld personally, even when the paper published a crow-eating,...

When it Raines,it pours (buckets)-- Times scandal gaining more attention by the day Does anyone remember the name Jayson Blair? How about Howell Raines? Both in their way have disgraced The New York Times, but at this point at least one seems to have been forgotten. That's Jayson Blair, the plagiarist, who's now out peddling a book idea. The other, Raines, seems to grow in national importance by the day, but not in the importance the Times is used to or particularly relishes. The Blair plagiarism scandal may not yet have made Raines into a household name in, say, the...

Jayson Blair was the Great Black Hope. The white publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Sulzberger's white executive editor, Howell Raines, were intent on creating the Great African-American Reporter, and Blair was their guy. No matter, that Sulzberger and Raines were 80 years late. The Great Negro Reporter had already come and gone. George S. Schuyler (1895-1977), whose career was ended by the civil rights movement whose most trenchant critic he was, was a self-made man, who needed no white philanthropist/image-makers to invent him. But that's a story for another day. In William McGowan's excellent book,...

When the New York Times's Jayson Blair was busted for plagiarism and fabrications — and then its star writer Rick Bragg was suspended and quit after claiming an intern's reporting as his own — the media lit up like the switchboard of a gossipy small town. Reporters investigated reporters. The Times newsroom erupted in finger pointing. Journalism professors raised themselves up on their suede elbow patches to tsk-tsk. Newspapers worriedly reviewed their policies. Collectively, we agonized: Will the public ever trust us again? Don't sweat it! the public replied. We didn't trust you in the first place! That's the message,...

June 3, 2003, 9:35 a.m. Fear and Self-Loathing A southern affliction. By Martha Zoller The fear and self-loathing often felt by some southerners over the region's past has been playing out in some of the most unlikely places of late — for instance, on the front page and in the editorial-board room of the New York Times. Take the Jayson Blair fiasco. At a meeting with Times staffers, executive editor Howell Raines said: "[Y]ou have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama… gave him [Blair] one chance too many… When I look into my heart...

How did one of the world's greatest newspapers wind up in a civil war? After being rocked by the serial fabrications of Jayson Blair and the controversial assisted reporting of Rick Bragg, the New York Times has been struggling to repair the damage. But the wounds are far deeper than immediately apparent, in part because of long-simmering resentment over Executive Editor Howell Raines's bruising management style -- and a bureaucratic structure that protected the likes of Blair and Bragg, though their conduct was vastly different. As the newsroom meltdown played out in the press, Raines and his management team hunkered...

I n June, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on two lawsuits against the University of Michigan's use of affirmative action in admissions to its undergraduate program and law school, respectively. The mainstream, socialist media have predictably supported the continued admission to otherwise highly selective universities of unqualified black and Hispanic applicants, based on their race or ethnicity, as a means to achieve "diversity." Since affirmative action's 1960s' origins, however, this plague has spread beyond college admissions, to corrupt all of America's institutions. In higher education, affirmative action has led to the hiring of incompetent, often openly racist black and...

recent lead story in New York Times, "Leading Drugs for Psychosis Come Under Scrutiny," suggested that the newest schizophrenia medicines had been marketed as wonder drugs only to be as exposed as no better than older, cheaper medications. To make this case, the writer, Erica Goode, noted that "researchers at the [American Psychiatric Association] meetings presented a study of the cost effectiveness of Zyprexa (one of the newer medications) in treating patients at 17 Veterans Affairs medical centers. The study, led by Dr. Robert Rosenheck, a professor of psychiatry and public health at Yale and the director of the...

BYU Student Group Returns Web AwardsSaturday, May 31, 2003 - Page updated at 2:13 p.m. Brigham Young University's student news organization has given up two national awards for Web page design because the two students who crafted the page copied material from another Web site.This spring, the BYU site NewsNet won first place among colleges for Web page design in a contest sponsored by the University of Missouri chapter of the Society of Newspaper Design. The site also won a second place for best college newspaper online in a contest sponsored by the trade publication Editor & Publisher.NewsNet officials were...

There is no end to the soul-searching at The New York Times. Or the committees. The Times, already distracted by a month of scandals and newsroom unrest, was bracing for more of both as two ranking editors formed a second group to improve inhouse communications. Assistant Managing Editors Craig Whitney and Andrew Rosenthal invited staffers to join what they're calling the Communications Working Group. They said it would differ from a powerful committee headed by Assistant Managing Editor Allan Siegal by "concentrating on internal communications" and having no outside consultants. Many at The Times viewed formation of the new group...

Have you heard that it's 1933 in America? God knows I have. Three times in the last few weeks I have been told -- by a novelist, an art historian and a professor of classics at Harvard, none of them ideologues or cranks -- that the erosion of civil liberties under the Bush administration constitutes an early stage, or at least a precursor, to the kind of fascism Hitler brought to Germany. I first heard the 1933 analogy a few months back, when one of the nation's leading scholars of international law suggested at a meeting of diplomats that Bush's...

I have been following the dilemma at The New York Times. I'm sure most people know by now that a reporter, Jayson Blair, was fired for fabricating and plagiarizing many stories. From news reports, it appears that Times editors knew about his deficiencies long before he was fired. The question is: Why wasn't he fired long before ago? Was it his race? Blair is black and, according to some people, minorities are treated by liberals such as The New York Times editors with unusual care under these circumstances. I have read that at least 12 Times editors had access to...

Op/Ed - William F. Buckley Yahoo!News WHO WROTE THIS? By William F. Buckley Jr. There is a swirl of controversy having to do with writing, with credit for writing, and with disclosure about who writes what and under what circumstances... There is a swirl of controversy having to do with writing, with credit for writing, and with disclosure about who writes what and under what circumstances... The case is difficult to make, who all gets credit. The stream of commentators discussing the Bragg story for some reason (those I read or saw or heard) neglected to make the contextual point...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation's largest group of professional historians has scrapped the way it handles plagiarism allegations, doing away with secret proceedings in an effort to spotlight problems when they arise. The American Historical Association decided to end its 15-year practice of adjudication, where complaints were heard, discussed and decided behind closed doors. The focus now will be to educate historians, students and the public. The change comes after high-profile plagiarism cases involving historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and the late Stephen Ambrose, as well as former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. On Saturday, The New York Times reported...

LOS ANGELES - When O.J. Simpson was ruled not guilty of murdering his wife, the United States discovered overnight the chasm of difference in perception between blacks (who found the verdict reasonable) and whites (who found it insane). Something similar is going on with the fabrication scandals that have rocked The New York Times this month. Elite reporters and editors are reacting to the Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg revelations with sorrow and anxiety, while the rest of us proles revel in the spectacle of a haughty institution being humbled and mocked. Why are journalists so glum? Because The New...

11.30amFresh embarrassment for New York TimesCiar ByrneThursday May 29, 2003The Guardian New York Times: reporter claimed it was routine practice for freelances to write large chunks of articles  A Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter has quit the paper after he was accused of drawing too heavily on the work of a freelance writer, in a further embarrassing episode for the scandal-hit newspaper.Rick Bragg, a national correspondent based in New Orleans, tendered his resignation last night to the New York Times' executive editor, Howell Raines, after the paper published an editor's statement admitting he had relied heavily on the work...

6pmLeaked emails add to NY Times' woes Ciar ByrneThursday May 29, 2003The GuardianCan the headlines get any worse for the New York Times? Once a beacon of US broadsheet journalism, the Times has already been rocked by charges of plagiarism, and now its rival the Washington Post has heaped on fresh embarrassment by reporting an unseemly squabble between two senior journalists on the paper.According to leaked emails seen by the Washington Post, the Times' Pulitzer prize-winning Baghdad bureau chief, John Burns, was in high dudgeon when another Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, Judith Miller, filed an interview with Iraqi exile leader Ahmed...