Reporter's scoops were pack of lies, admits New York Times

Telegraph ^ | 5/12/03 | Marcus Warren in New York

[kattracks]

The New York Times, America's most formidable - and critics would say "smuggest" - daily paper made an extraordinary public confession yesterday, unmasking one of its reporters as a serial plagiarist and fraud.

Jayson Blair, a 27-year-old reporter, was exposed for dozens of cases of dishonesty and fiction in his stories, in what the newspaper called "a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper".

The scandal, outlined in a four-page, 7,000-word exposé, revealed a bizarre pattern of deceit by Mr Blair and a complete failure by editors at the newspaper that regards itself as America's number one journal of record, to detect the problem.

Using a mobile telephone and computer access to databases, the journalist made a mockery of the paper's reputation for factual accuracy and professionalism, rigorous even by US standards.

"He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes," the paper confessed yesterday.

"He selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not." Blair, who has resigned from the paper, filed stories from 20 cities on some of the biggest national stories of the last few months but appears hardly to have left his base in New York throughout the period.

His supposedly eye-witness description of the grief suffered by the family of Pte Jessica Lynch before the US prisoner-of-war was rescued turned out to be a tissue of lies.

Her father, for example, "choked up as he stood on his porch overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures", Mr Blair wrote.

There is no such view and the journalist's mobile telephone bills from the time show that he was in New York, not West Virginia.

From his reporting of the "Beltway Sniper" outside Washington DC last autumn to his unmasking at the end of April, Blair did not claim expenses for a single air ticket, hotel room or car rental, the paper said.

He was found out when a journalist in Texas noticed quotes from the mother of a soldier missing in action in Iraq which appeared in her story resurfacing almost verbatim in Blair's.

The increasingly blatant nature of his lying suggested "the work of a troubled young man veering toward professional self-destruction", wrote the New York Times, which has assigned a team of journalists to re-check Blair's stories.

Their inquiry has found that his claim that he lost a cousin in the terrorist attack on the Pentagon in September 2001 was a lie too.

Blair's youth, he is 27, and his colour, he is black, may have helped him get away with his talent for fiction-writing, some media commentators have suggested.

A likeable young man with an easy manner in the newsroom, Blair may have been seen as a protégé by senior figures at the paper, eager to encourage diversity.

His privileged position may also have saved him from any fall-out from a memo circulated by one editor, alarmed by his performance, a year ago that read: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now."

"It's a huge black eye," Arthur Sulzberger, the newspaper's publisher, said of the scandal.

The report described the atmosphere in the paper's newsroom near Times Square, which is named after the newspaper, as that of a wake for an estranged relative. It said: "Employees accept the condolences of callers."

[Psalm 73]

Or:
"We editorialize - you repeat as fact."

[RJL]

Reporter's scoops were pack of lies, admits New York Times

We couldn't tell the difference between this guy and the rest of the Times, what's worse, neither could the Times.

After years of lies, the Times only figured it out after another newspaper told the Times that their guy was cutting and pasting his reporters work.