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I'm a little disturbed at the racial tone of the responses here. If this had been a white reporter, I doubt his skin color would have even been brought up. But because this guy happened to be black, this suddenly becomes about the evils of affirmative action.

Far more likely is that this guy was a terrific con artist, plain and simple.

I steadfastly oppose quotas and affirmative action. I think they're both profoundly un American and certainly unconstitutional.

The underlying ugliness of many of the posts on this thread depresses me. The conservative movement is far better than this.

The simple fact that his boss wrote a memo in April 2002 saying that they must get rid of him "now" and they DID NOT appears to make the case for special favors (and, with the Times' history, the fact that he was AA likely being the key issue that saved him is not a reach). I stand by what I posted about it being and affirmative action issue; a white or Asian reporter would likely NEVER have survived this many known errors for so long.

This isn't about race, it's about the fact that a man was allowed to make 50 mistakes and maintain his job. It's the duty of everyone to explore the reasons. Maybe it was liberal bias, maybe it was laziness, maybe it was just because he got away with it. Whatever the reason, it weakens the confidence in our media (it wasn't that great to begin with).

The Old Gray Lady has become senile.

Look at it this way. When it's discovered that Bill Bennett blew millions of dollars in gambling casinos, that was news. Why? Because Bennett postures himself as a man of virtue and a moral authority. Aside from all the other angles (political and otherwise), the story resonates because Bennett holds a higher standard for everyone else because of his own demand for that standard.

So when the New York Times, which postures itself not just as the "Newspaper of Record" but also of the highest standards of liberalism, finds out (way after it should have known) that a national reporter has been making up facts and plagerizing in stories published just below their masthead, it is news because of their demand for the high standard they want to impose on everyone else. That the reporter is African-American, and had previously been publicly trumpeted by the paper in their effort to achieve workplace diversity, is icing on the cake.

Frankly, many newsrooms have been as lily white as the locker room at the Augusta National Country Club for decades but you'd never know it for all the moralizing they do and posturing for *everyone else* to conform to their vision of equality. They hold themselves exempt from what they expect of everyone else and when they finally try to right their own wrong by cutting corners, it explodes in their faces.

I, for one, expressed sympathy for the writer (see above). He's certainly not the only liar at the New York Times.