Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception

The New York Times ^ | May 11, 2003

[aristeides]

Washington City Paper seems to think Blair seduced the NYT editors: Off Target.

[Lancey Howard]

Liberals admire skilful lying. Look at how they love Clinton. They just don't like those who bungle it and get busted.

Amen and a big BUMP to that.

The New York Times is more embarrassed that they got caught lying than they are for the lying itself.

[pttttt]

Uh, isn't Jayson Blair following in the grand tradition established by Walter Duranty?

For those who were born too late to get this well-placed reference, Walter Duranty was a since-discredited comsymp apologist for Stalin who won a Pulitzer in 1932 for bogus coverage and whitewash of Communist-caused starvation in Ukraine. More at http://www.nationalreview.com/stuttaford/stuttaford.asp about how the NYT hadn't yet disowned him and at last reading was still taking credit for that Pulitzer.

It would make an interesting Freeper screen name...

[Lancey Howard]

The scumbag liberal newsrooms are imploding all across the country. They look around and cannot believe that the massive mindless rabble is no longer so easily programmable. They can't handle their growing irrelevancy.

[pttttt]

The Times regrets that it did not detect the journalistic deceptions sooner. A separate internal inquiry, by the management, will examine the newsroom's processes for training, assignment and accountability.

They should talk to Reader's Digest. Their fact-checking is the best in the business. They busted Mike Barnacle and others. The worst thing that can happen to a faker is for Reader's Digest to get interested in their story.

[gov_bean_ counter]

You mean to tell me the NYT reporters make up stories?

I'm shocked, I tell you just shocked. And appalled.

[Pukka Puck]

I agree. Management has to go either way.

[Crawdad]

Mike Barnicle must be loving this.

[kitkat]

***I wonder if they'll be eligible for a Pulitzer for investigative journalism?***

Funny you should ask. In 1981 a Washington Post reporter received the Pulitzer prize for a series of articles about an 8-year-old drug addict. It was later discovered that she fabricated the information. Gives one the impression that these liberal papers don't much care to check on the truth of their reporters, doesn't it?

[plusone]

What this guy did was penny-ante compared to the lies peddaled by the NY Times reporter Walter Durranty during the 1930's while he was stationed in Moscow. Bought off by Stalin, he helped to cover up the Ukrainian Holocaust of 1932/33 in which millions of private farmers were starved to death or deported to death camps because they resisted Stalin's attempts at Collectivized Agriculture.

[Loyalist]

Janet Cooke had a long, hard fall from grace; a few years ago, she was working as a $6/hour sales clerk at a discount store somewhere in Michigan.

[okie01]

"Janet Cooke had a long, hard fall from grace; a few years ago, she was working as a $6/hour sales clerk at a discount store somewhere in Michigan."

Something similar will, and should, happen to Jayson Blair. He'll never work in journalism again. Under his own name, anyway...

But isn't this just one more sad story from the "affirmative action" files? Blair seems to have gotten the gig with the Times under the auspices of affirmative action. Their hiring policies are multi-culturally friendly, to the extreme, and it is rather doubtful that a white kid with Blair's pedigree would've warranted the internship, the eventual hire or subsequent rapid promotion. Not to mention freedom from the consequences of his multiple errors...

So, Blair gets away with it for four years. When strong discipline might've controlled the situation early, it wasn't forthcoming. The situation, uncorrected, snowballed until the Times experiences a professional crisis...and the kid's career is destroyed.

These are the same results that Ivy League colleges get when they recruit under-qualified minorities under the umbrella of affirmative action. The institution feels better about itself. But the kid suffers failure -- and may never recover.

Liberals are soooooooooo good at patting themselves on the back. And destroying the lives of others...

[Tall_Texan]

Say, who started putting out that DC sniper profile of an angry white gun nut in a white SUV, anyways?

[buffyt]

I was shocked that NY X made such a fuss about this. The article I read on their site (may be same as the one on this thread) was really long, 8 or more pages. Blair is a big fat liar. But I didn't know the truth was ever important to NY X.

[RWG]

Blair, who is black, came to the Times as part of an internship program designed to help the paper attract more minority reporters...affirmative action is a liar.

[RWG]

Wondered about the age of the liar. Local media in hay seed country are young and green for the most part, apparently in new york they are young and black.

[cgbg]

There was no inkling, Mr. Raines said, that the newspaper was dealing with ``a pathological pattern of misrepresentation, fabricating and deceiving.´´

Mr. Raines needs to get out more.

In flyover country everybody knows that is what the Old Gray Whore is about every day!

[Tall_Texan]

``a pathological pattern of misrepresentation, fabricating and deceiving.´´

This deserves to be on their masthead. Replace "All the news that's fit to print" with "A pathological pattern of misrepresentation, fabricating and deceiving" and the Times will have broken new ground for "Truth in Advertising" standards. No wonder these guys supported Clinton - they are both so disinterested in the truth.

[Drango]

http://www.msnbc.com/news/912116.asp

Newsweek update...

---

...Sunday’s story honestly detailed the startling breakdown in communication among Times editors about Blair’s extensive—and well-chronicled—history of problems with accuracy and sloppiness. The paper was unflinching in its description of how the Times failed to track Blair’s expense reports and missed glaring warning signs along the way—like the time a national editor saw Blair in the newsroom hours after he had supposedly filed a story from West Virginia. Times metro editor Jonathan Landman was quoted as being particularly vocal about Blair; in April 2002 Landman, the Times story reports, sent a two-sentence e-mail message to newsroom administrators: “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”
        But there’s plenty that the Times report, which ran under the rubric correcting the record, didn’t fully explore, namely how a troubled young reporter whose short career was rife with problems was able to advance so quickly. Internally, reporters had wondered for years whether Blair was given so many chances—and whether he was hired in the first place—because he was a promising, if unpolished, black reporter on a staff that continues to be, like most newsrooms in the country, mostly white. The Times also didn’t address an uncomfortable but unavoidable topic that has been broached with some of the paper’s top editors during the past week: by favoring Blair, did the Times end up reinforcing some of the worst suspicions about the pitfalls of affirmative action? And will there be fewer opportunities for young minority reporters in the future? We have, generally, a horribly undiverse staff,” says one Times staffer. “And so we hold up and promote the few black staffers we have.” That’s a point other news outlets have made since Blair resigned. Executive editor Howell Raines, who declined repeated requests for an inter-view with NEWSWEEK, told NPR, when pressed about whether Blair was pushed along because of his race, “No, I do not see it as illustrating that point. I see it as illustrating a tragedy for Jayson Blair.” (Blair, whose voice mail at the Times was still active as of Saturday evening, did not respond to a message left there or on his cell phone; several sources at the Times say he is currently in a hospital setting dealing with personal problems.)
        Blair’s close mentoring relationship with Times managing editor Gerald Boyd, who is also black, was not explored in depth in the paper. Blair wrote Boyd’s biographical sketch in the Times’s internal newsletter when Boyd was named managing editor. Blair was known to brag about his close personal relationships with both Boyd and Raines, and the young writer frequently took cigarette breaks with Boyd.
        Questions about Raines’s management style—his penchant for giving preferential treatment to favored stars, his celebrated fondness for “flooding the zone” on big stories, severely stretching resources—weren’t addressed at all. Indeed, more than one Times staffer pointed out that the paper’s national staff would not have been in need of the services of an untested young reporter with a spotty track record had a number of veterans not been pushed out by Raines last year.
        Of course, plagiarism, and even outright fraud, can occur at any news organization, and certainly the lion’s share of the blame for this scandal should fall on Blair. As commentators have noted, the normal journalistic checks and balances are put in place with the assumption that everyone—reporters, editors and readers—shares an interest in getting to the truth. “The per-son who did this is Jayson Blair,” Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in Sunday’s story. “Let’s not begin to demonize our executives.” As the Times seeks to come to grips with how this could have happened, there is bound to be a lot more soul-searching in the months ahead.