Posted on 05/11/2003 2:17:04 PM PDT by Timesink
A Journalist’s Hard Fall
| The New York Times confronts an embarrassing trail of deceit—and difficult questions about its own culture [...] 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.) [...] 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. [...] |
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.com ...
I think you should be asking about Pinch Sulzberger's.
According to the story in today's Washington Post, people at the NYT say everyone just assumed Blair had graduated from the University of Maryland.
According to that story also, Raines and other senior editors were considering giving Blair a big promotion shortly before the scandal broke:
Raines and his senior editors, meanwhile, were so impressed with Blair's seemingly far-flung reporting that they discussed giving him a permanent spot on the coveted national staff. "Here was a guy who had been working hard and getting into the paper on significant stories," Raines told the Times. But Roberts balked, saying he told Boyd that Blair "works the way he lives -- sloppily."
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red-amp-quot-semi is probably read by the browser as a numerical value close to #00FF00 .
Unlike magazines and books, newspapers don't have enough lead time to allow for factchecking in most cases. You simply have to trust your reporters to be telling the truth. Of course, that requires hiring trustworthy reporters in the first place, and since Jayson Blair was known to have committed similar transgressions at his college newspaper, we have to ask why The Times either did not learn about this before hiring him or did learn about it and hired him anyway.
And yes, they could hire a few factcheckers to do random spot checks of Times reporters, but a) they would cost money, and newspapers don't like to spend money; and b) the unions would raise holy hell if the paper tried this, for all the obvious reasons.
2. Why not require timely submission of expense reports? Then phantom trips would be detected. This makes sense for BOTH editorial and accounting accuracy.
You are dead on with this question. It appears Times reporters can simply scribble whatever they want on their expense reports w/o having to show much proof at all. Must be an office perk, since they're all such trustworthy people as to have been hired as reporters for the Mighty New York Times in the first place, eh? (Either that or Blair spent all the time he should have spent reporting on his computer at home instead faking up receipts for nonexistent hotels and car rental companies.)
3. Do other newspapers check stories for accuracy better than the Times? Can they teach the Times how to do this?
No. To the best of my knowledge, there are no daily newspapers that expend any meaningful amount of time or money on factchecking except in cases like this one, where they have reason to believe one of their own has gone bad and they have to go back over everything he/she's ever written for them.
However, there are plenty of magazines and book publishers that could teach them, if The Times really cared enough to ever institute a factchecking policy. The New Yorker, in particular, has always been notorious - but deeply admired - for its beyond-anal hardcore factchecking. Not one word in that magazine gets in there without it being checked first, no matter how long it takes or how tedious the questions. "So you have two trees in your backyard, correct? Not three or one? And they are indeed dogwoods? Okay, please confirm, on the day of the interview you were wearing a plaid lumberjack shirt..." Etc. Or, at least, they were like this ten years or so ago, just before the execrable Tina Brown got her hands on the magazine. I don't know if she mucked up their factchecking department.)
4. The Times says nothing about improving its checks on reporters. How many other Jayson Blairs are on its staff? Whey should we think there is only one villain?
We shouldn't. I was thinking myself of starting a "Let's pick a Times story at random once or twice a week" thread and fact-checking it ourselves, just to see if the information holds up (and for the fun of it, of course).
5. How did a journalisim student WITHOUT a degree (Blair dropped out of Maryland - according to reports I've seen) get a job with the Times in the first place? I'll let Matthew Hoy answer that one:
Jayson Blair, media ethics and diversity programs: I've spent some time thinking about the brouhaha regarding former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair's plagiarism. If you're not familiar with the story, head over to MediaMinded -- he's done a fine job of covering the issue.
I must confess that, while the Blair story was on my radar, it didn't really catch my interest at first. A reporter had plagiarized another's work. Troubling, yes, but probably the biggest reason it made national news was that the plagiarist worked for The New York Times -- the paper of record. Until Monday, that's all I thought there was to it.
Thanks to MediaMinded, Romensko and others I learned differently.
As Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz pointed out on his CNN show "Reliable Sources" Blair is (relatively) young, probably about 27 years old, and black.
For someone in journalism, those two facts are sure to raise some eyebrows.
According to reports, Blair was part of a Times internship program for minority journalists -- that was how he got his foot in the door. After his internship ended, he was offered a job and the rest, as they say, is history. From all indications, Blair is a talented writer and reporter. Unfortunately, he has too much drive and ambition and not nearly enough common sense or ethical standards.
I'll probably get some hate mail for saying this, but it's true, Blair would never have even had the Times job if it wasn't for his skin color. For those non-journalists out there, let me explain how a journalism career typically works.
Once you graduate from J-school, you apply for jobs at any and every paper you can find. When I graduated in 1994, the job market was pretty tight. Like Blair, I got a job offer from the paper I had interned at the summer before. Unlike Blair, the paper was the Lompoc Record, a six-day-a-week, 8,000 circulation paper. I was paid $8 an hour (for a job that required a college degree).
A couple of months earlier, I had attended a minority job fair. Now, I'm not a minority, I'm a person of pallor. Unfortunately for the people running this job fair, whoever made up their flyers failed to put the word "minority" anywhere on them. By the time I found out that it was for minorities, they already had my registration and my money -- I figured what the heck.
One of the interesting and attractive aspects of the job fair was the fact that you could request that they set up interviews for you with some of the participating newspapers. I was in need of a job, so I took advantage of that. Now, I attended with a couple of my fellow journalism students from Cal Poly SLO. With the last names of Hooper and Bailey -- each of them had 4 interviews pre-scheduled for them when they arrived. I, Matthew Hoy, had a dozen. Now, I'm not suggesting that I was more popular than most because my name sounded Asian, but...well...OK, I am suggesting that I got more interviews because the scheduler thought I was Asian. Both Hooper and Bailey thought that was the case.
In fact, as I went through the 30 minute interviews (talk about mentally exhausting), on several occasions I could tell that there was some surprise that I wasn't Asian. A couple of interviewers even asked about the origin of the name "Hoy."
Anyway, at your first job you learn the ropes. You work your butt off to get some good clips. After a year or two -- no more than two -- you start hunting for your second job at a bigger paper for more pay. You spend two or three years there, and then you start looking for your third job. At that point, you can pick and choose your opportunities.
Back in the mid-90s, newspapers like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the San Diego Union-Tribune didn't hire people straight out of college. A recruiter for the Union-Tribune at the job fair said they didn't even consider applicants with less than five years experience in the field. That's obviously changed -- and not always for the better. (To my knowledge, the Union-Tribune has not hired anyone straight out of college for anything other than a news assistant position in the 2 1/2 years I've been there. Though we have hired people in various positions with only a year or two of experience.)
Newspapers have an interest in achieving diversity in the newsroom. Our reporters and editors should reflect their communities -- both in the color of their skin and their basic values and beliefs (unfortunately, very often, the latter is ignored). However, sometimes papers, in their efforts to "look like their readership," are willing to fudge on experience -- that's where the New York Times got into trouble with Jayson Blair.
In a job interview several years ago, I was asked whether I would like journalist who was a better reporter or one who was a better writer. I answered "better reporter," because, as an editor, I can rearrange, polish and tighten copy -- if all the information is there. A great writer who doesn't know what questions to ask and therefore has huge holes in his stories is a lot more trouble. It looks to me as though Jayson Blair is a great writer (as is the woman he plagiarized), but he was also apparently a weak reporter -- instead of doing actual reporting, he made the facts up.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that Blair's ethical disaster will tarnish good, talented and honest minority journalists at the Times and other papers. Now, in an ideal world, this sort of scandal would just sully journalism in general -- certainly if Blair were white and middle-aged that would be the case. But because he's a young black man who got the job at the Times largely because he is a young black man it raises a question about the competency of other young minority journalists. Are the minority intern program's chosen few under undue pressure to perform and succeed -- with journalistic ethics on the back burner (or completely off the stove)? That's really the most insidious thing about affirmative action and diversity programs -- that the exceptions that are made in the hiring and promotion of minorities can come back to haunt the program when something goes wrong.
If Jayson Blair had come to the Times after working for ten years at a variety of newspapers then his race wouldn't even been raised by Kurtz -- or anyone else for that matter. He would have been just another cautionary tale of journalism gone wrong. But the fact is that the color of Blair's skin opened doors for him that would have been closed to white journalists.
Hopefully if Blair's story teaches newspapers one thing it will be that skin color, ethnicity or national origin isn't the most important thing when it comes to hiring a reporter -- professionalism is. For major papers like the Times, you're not going to find that in a student straight out of college, no matter how talented they are.
OK not factchecking per say, but how about asking the reporter who the unidentified source is? Isn't that what hard-bitten editors do? Or have I seen too many movies about newsrooms?
Put a set of favorites in a folder, and put the folder in the Bookmarks Bar. Hold down the option key and click once on the pulldown menu button for that folder. Stand back.
Man, wouldn't that really be fun! Of course, it would have to be limited to "news articles" - we already know that there isn't much fact in the Op/Ed section.
We were -itchslapped on 9-11 and the libs just keep on slouching further towards Gamorrah
I'm enjoying the spectacle of the NYT eating crow.
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