Newspaper Daze, Part 2 -Jayson Blair

The Conning Tower ^ | 5/21/03 | Trentino

[Davis]

On Wednesday last, the head honchos of the New York Times, Pinch, Howell, and Gerald addressed a closed (to the press) meeting of the Times staff at the Loew's Astor theater on Broadway.

The Times' media editor, Jacques Steinberg, a member of the press, you see, was forbidden to attend but charged with the responsibility of covering the event for his employer. Ever resourceful, as Timesmen are expected to be, Steinberg relied on notes taken by embedded colleagues and perhaps on secretly made tape recordings for his account of the proceedings. It was published in the Times the following day. I borrow the master's phrase, "grim rigadoon," to describe this bizarre resolution of the Times' forbidding its left hand to make common cause with its right.

The meeting had been called to address the staff's anger directed primarily at Executive Editor Howell Raines. Raines "accepted responsibility," he said, for the Jayson Blair tempest. But Raines did not fall on his sword, and he declined to resign, so we are left to wonder what "accepting responsibility" means in New Times Roman.

From Steinberg's hearsay testimony we can gather that the troops were angry at Howell's failure to be collegial, to act on their advice concerning Mr. Blair and other cases of assignments and promotions. Raines acknowledged the injury to the Times caused by his failure to take timely action in Blair's case. He attributed this to his laudable desire as a white male from Alabama to use racial preference to "diversity" the Times newsroom, but then scored himself for having allowed racial preference to hinder his judgment. He seemed not to acknowledge that his passionate pursuit of diversity was no great boon to Jayson Blair.

On Saturday, Bill Keller, who lost out two years ago in the race for Executive Editor, published an op-ed column in the Times with nary a mention of Jayson and the Times's descent to its lowest point in 152 years. (But see my take on that point in Newspaper Daze, Part 1) It dealt, instead, with "Is President Bush a religious zealot, or does he just pander to that crowd?" To his credit, Keller did not ask whether Mr. Bush has stopped beating Laura.

It was left to Seth Mnookin of Newsweek to provide us with more facts of Jayson's Blair's life bearing on the Times's debacle.

Good news first; it seems that Blair has recovered from his fit of despondency and his plunge from the fourteenth floor of the Times building and is consulting with his lawyer and his literary agent from new digs in Manhattan...more

[Mind-numbed Robot]

With the rise of alternative news sources (the internet and talk radio) these leftist rags are in a downward spiral. This is due to a VMNC, a vast Mother Nature Conspiracy, which prefers truth to spin and freedom to socialist serfdom.