 |
 Schadenfreude  |
Posted on 05/13/2003 2:58:04 AM PDT by kattracks
The first time Macarena Hernandez crossed paths with Jayson Blair it was 1998 and they were both summer interns at the New York Times - about as close to the centre of the American media universe as it is possible for a college student to get. The affable, boundlessly energetic 21-year-old Blair shone: a year later, he was back at the world's most revered newspaper and rising fast. Hernandez, by contrast, went to work on a small Texan daily, the San Antonio Express-News.It was in that capacity that she was sent last month to interview a local woman whose soldier son was missing in Iraq. She wrote a tender piece, full of minutely observed details about the woman, Juanita Anguiano: the decor of her living-room, her hand gestures, her way of speaking. So when most of the same details appeared under Blair's name the following week - complete with the dateline of the Texan town where Anguiano lives - Hernandez's editor was outraged, and wrote to the Times to tell them. Blair, now 27, was asked to provide travel expenses to prove that he had travelled to Texas, and couldn't do so. He resigned last week.
Which was how, this Sunday, the Times came to publish one of the more extraordinary and humiliating sets of articles in journalistic history: a prominent front-page piece and four in side broadsheet pages, totalling nearly 14,000 words and headlined "Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Destruction". The result of an investigation by five Times reporters and two researchers, it showed that Blair had been making things up for years: fabricating sensational scoops on the Washington sniper case, inventing quotations from people he'd never spoken to, borrowing other reporters' work with abandon and frequently claiming to be in cities and towns across America when - according to phone records and travel expenses - he was usually in Brooklyn, where he lived.
"His tools of deceit were a cellphone and a laptop computer," the paper noted, explaining how Blair had elaborately contrived to update his editors on the progress of stories he was supposedly covering. He studied photographs on the paper's internal computer network, the story said, and used them to describe the places where he wasn't. "The widespread fabrication and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper," read the first paragraph of the story on the newspaper of record's front page.
The revelations have generated saturation coverage in the US. "It's easily the biggest journalistic scandal since Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer prize for a story she made up from whole cloth. The scale of this is pretty immense," says Jack Shafer, editor-at-large of Slate magazine, and one of several media analysts to draw a parallel with the Washington Post journalist and her 1980 story of "Jimmy", an eight-year-old heroin addict who turned out to be a figment of her imagination. Because Blair is black, the controversy has also rejuvenated a longstanding debate on affirmative action, and whether the Times's commitment to hiring a diverse workforce had ended up overexposing someone who wasn't ready for the big time.
No newspaper, as the Times's executive editor, Howell Raines, has been quick to point out, could be designed to catch the most determined fraudster intent on abusing the trust that is the basis of journalism. (Nor, incidentally, does the British press have anything to feel smug about here: it is precisely the fact that ethical standards are more rigorous in the US, more than one American reporter argued yesterday, that explains why the newspaper had to act as it did, and why the scandal has made so many waves.) But never before has it happened on this scale at the Times, which occupies a central position in the US that has no British parallel.
"It's more like a government ministry in the way it feels it needs to carry out this investigation," says Kurt Andersen, the veteran media-watcher. "They regard themselves as the great keeper of the flame of truth and accuracy."
Blair and the New York Times seemed like a perfect fit. At the Boston Globe, where he had interned before, the University of Maryland student had been "controversial", according to David Shribman, then the paper's Washington bureau chief. "I was down on him," Shribman told the Globe. "He was kind of sneaky and snoopy with other reporters, in personal gossip. It was plain that I was disapproving of him ... and I let other editors there know."
But at the Times's newsroom on West 43rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, he impressed the upper echelons so much they asked him back in June 1999, on the assumption - wrong, as it turned out - that he had graduated from his university. On the police beat and then on the paper's Metro desk he was fearsomely productive but also a study in disorganisation, letting voicemails pile up and having to be warned about his personal appearance, the Times investigators discovered.
He drank. "I told him that he needed to find a different way to nourish himself than by drinking scotch, smoking cigarettes and buying Cheez Doodles from the vending machine," Charles Strum, an editor on the Metro desk, told the Times. But the diet seemed to do the job, for now, and he got more and more adventurous assignments.
The number of corrections that his stories were generating was an issue as early as 2000, but it was after the September 11 terrorist attacks that it began to draw the attention of senior editors. "A lot was going on at that time: fear of further terrorist attacks, anthrax scares, grief," the Times investigators wrote. "Uncharacteristic behaviour was not uncommon among people in the city or in the news room. Still, Mr Blair's actions stood out. He made mistakes and was unavailable for long stretches."
By April 2002, Jonathan Landman, the paper's Metro editor, was prompted to send an email, apparently to senior Times employees. "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the paper," it read. "Right now." Blair went on leave and came back, according to reports, on the understanding that he would be writing smaller, closely monitored assignments. Then, on October 2, a 55-year-old man named James Martin was killed by a single gunshot in the car park of a supermarket in suburban Maryland, the first victim of the so-called Washington snipers. Eight Times reporters were dispatched. Blair was among them, apparently on the grounds that he knew the area well.
Blair's scoops on the sniper case caused consternation at the Washington Post. Specifically, editors there were reportedly irritated by a December story on how law-enforcement sources believed that some of them had been carried out by John Lee Malvo, the teenager arrested for the shootings along with John Muhammad, who, as a trained army marksman, was a more likely candidate. His evidence included a CCTV videotape and a grape-stem apparently carrying Malvo's DNA. According to the Times investigation, they never existed. And, as with many of the often sensational sniper stories that Blair filed with a Washington dateline, cellphone records showed that he was actually in New York. But he didn't seem to be trying to cover his tracks much by that stage: the next month, he submitted expense receipts on days he was supposed to be in Washington that clearly showed he'd been drinking at branches of Starbucks, and eating with "contacts" at restaurants, in Brooklyn. On at least one instance, audaciously, he even seems to have been filing the story from his desk at the Times. And after the rescue of the prisoner-of-war Jessica Lynch, Blair was sent - or so his editors believed - to the family's home in Palestine, West Virginia, a dateline he used on a sequence of reports re-creating their rustic surroundings in detail. But the details that were true had been reported by others, while many, including the view of "tobacco fields and cattle pastures" from the Lynch home, appear to have been invented.
"What he did is on an epic scale," says Alex Jones, a former Times journalist, author of a monumental history of the paper, and now a professor at Harvard University. "But the thing that shocked me was the reaction of people when they read about [themselves] in the New York Times and knew it to be false. Their reaction seemed to be a kind of shrug - 'What do you expect?'" Not one person whom Blair claimed falsely to have interviewed contacted the paper to point it out. The affirmative-action question is harder to resolve. Numerous prominent commentators, including Andersen and the Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, argue that Blair's race must have played a role in his rapid promotion: Raines is outspokenly committed to a hiring policy that he once characterised, rather awkwardly, as having made the newsroom "better, and, more importantly, more diverse."
But it is hardly the case, as Kurtz seemed to suggest, that a white reporter with an error rate as high as Blair's - he had had 50 stories corrected since he joined the paper - would have aroused suspicions sooner. A deft bit of database searching by the Weekly Standard magazine showed that Blair's 50 corrections worked out at 6.9% of his stories - a rather better rate than the paper's veteran commentator RW Apple (14.1%) or Washington bureau reporter Adam Clymer (9%). Among his Times colleagues, Blair had a reputation as a friendly face who would compliment people regularly on their articles, and often claimed access to important gossip or documents involving senior executives. Yesterday, journalists at the paper flatly refused to speak on the record, or even in unattributed quotations. They were furious at what they saw as an attempt on Raines's part, in Sunday's article, to evade direct responsibility for hiring and promoting Blair - something that may have motivated a memo they received by email yesterday from Raines, Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger and Gerald Boyd, the managing editor.
"While we deplore Jayson's conduct, we also recognise that, however difficult it may be, it is the responsibility of the Times, its publisher, its executive editor and its managing editor to protect that bond of trust and prevent such occurrences or, at the very least, uncover them rapidly," it read. "In the case of Jayson Blair, our organisational safeguards and our individual responses were insufficient. Howell, Gerald and I accept the responsibility for that." Blair has retreated from public view: a Newsweek report yesterday described him as being in a "hospital setting". In a brief interview with the Associated Press, he read from a letter he said he had sent to his former bosses. "I have been struggling with recurring personal issues," he read. "I am now seeking appropriate counseling ... and I regret what I have done."
"I just think the guy could not do it," says Shafer. "Breaking news is hard and tedious and time-consuming work. So rather than put some deep psychological gloss on it that makes him the victim, rather than readers, who are the real victims, I much prefer to say maybe he just couldn't do it."
“Mr. Raines, you spoke to a convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in 2001, and you specifically mentioned Jayson Blair as an example of the Times spotting and hiring the best and brightest reporters on their way up. You said, 'This campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.' And I wonder now, looking back, if you see this as something of a cautionary tale, that maybe Jayson Blair was given less scrutiny or more of a pass on the corrections to his stories that you had to print because the paper had an interest in cultivating a young, black reporter.”
Raines’ defensive reply: “No, I do not see it as illustrating that point. I see it as illustrating a tragedy for Jayson Blair, that here was a person who under the conditions in which other journalists perform adequately decided to fabricate information and mislead colleagues. And it is--you know, I don't want to demonize Jayson, but this is a tragedy of failure on his part.”
Geez, did they ever hear of asking for a college transcript or copy of a diploma? It's not that difficult!
I've been in journalism my whole career; nobody's ever asked me for a transcript or any proof I ever attended.
|
Schadenfreude |
CNNs of Commission, Rapist Demagogues and 9/11
 the movie |
Democratic Party's Problem Transcends Its Anti-War Contingent
The first time Macarena Hernandez crossed paths with Jayson Blair it was 1998 and they were both summer interns at the New York Times - about as close to the centre of the American media universe as it is possible for a college student to get. The affable, boundlessly energetic 21-year-old Blair shone: a year later, he was back at the world's most revered newspaper and rising fast. Hernandez, by contrast, went to work on a small Texan daily, the San Antonio Express-News.
It was in that capacity that she was sent last month to interview a local woman whose soldier son was missing in Iraq. She wrote a tender piece, full of minutely observed details about the woman, Juanita Anguiano: the decor of her living-room, her hand gestures, her way of speaking. So when most of the same details appeared under Blair's name the following week - complete with the dateline of the Texan town where Anguiano lives - Hernandez's editor was outraged, and wrote to the Times to tell them. Blair, now 27, was asked to provide travel expenses to prove that he had travelled to Texas, and couldn't do so. He resigned last week.
How can a person be 21 in the summer of 1998 and 27 in the spring of 2003?
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.
