The Old Gray Liar (Ann Coulter)

World Net Daily ^ | 5/14/2003 | Ann Coulter

[TLBSHOW]

The Old Gray Liar

By Ann Coulter

The New York Times is to be commended for ferreting out Jayson Blair, the reporter recently discovered making up facts, plagiarizing other news organizations and lying about nonexistent trips and interviews. A newspaper that employs Maureen Dowd can't have had an easy time settling on Blair as the scapegoat. Blair's record of inaccuracies, lies and distortions made him a candidate for either immediate dismissal or his own regular column on the op-ed page.

The editors have set up a special e-mail address for readers to report falsehoods they discover in Jayson Blair articles. OK, but how about setting up one for Paul Krugman? They ought to claim all those front-page articles predicting a "quagmire" in Iraq were also written by Blair.

The Times has now willingly abandoned its mantle as the "newspaper of record," leapfrogging its impending technological obsolescence. It was already up against the Internet and Lexis-Nexis as a research tool. All the Times had left was its reputation for accuracy.

As this episode shows, the Times is not even attempting to preserve a reliable record of events. Instead of being a record of history, the Times is merely a "record" of what liberals would like history to be – the Pentagon in crisis, the war going badly, global warming melting the North Pole, and protests roiling Augusta National Golf Club. Publisher Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger has turned the paper into a sort of bulletin board for Manhattan liberals.

In the Soviet-style reporting preferred at the Times, its self-investigation of the Blair scandal included copious denials that race had anything to do with it:

"Mr. Boyd [managing editor] said last week that the decision to advance Mr. Blair had not been based on race."

"Mr. Blair's Times supervisors ... emphasize that he earned an internship at The Times because of glowing recommendations and a remarkable work history, not because he is black. The Times offered him a slot in an internship program that was then being used in large part to help the paper diversify its newsroom."

Did Blair write that? If the Times "diversity" program refused to consider Blair's race, then it wasn't much of a diversity program, now was it? This is like job advertisements that proclaim: "Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Employer." Well, which is it?

In one of several feverish editorials supporting the University of Michigan's race-based admissions program, the Times denounced the Bush administration for imagining "that diversity can be achieved without explicitly taking race into account." Any diversity program that failed to do so, the Times lectured, was "necessarily flawed." But then it gets caught publishing Jayson Blair and the Times demurely insists that its own affirmative action program scrupulously ignored race.

The Times not only expressly took race into account, but also put Blair's race above everything – accuracy, credibility and the paper's reputation. It hired a kid barely out of college. In fact, it turns out he was not yet out of college. He had no professional journalistic experience, except at the Times. He screwed up over and over again and the paper had to print 50 corrections to articles he'd written.

Despite all this, Blair was repeatedly published on the front page, promoted and sent love notes from the editor in chief, Howell Raines. Ignoring the warnings of a few intrepid whistleblowers, top management kept assigning Blair to bigger stories in new departments without alerting the editors to Blair's history because – as Raines said – it would "stigmatize" him. (After this scandal, does the demand for black heart surgeons go up or down?) Raines jettisoned the Times' famous slogan, "All the News That's Fit to Print," preferring the slogan: "The New York Times: Now With Even More Black People!"

If mismanagement at Enron had been this clear-cut, the Times would be demanding the death penalty for Ken Lay. Indeed, taking a page from all corporate scandals, the Times insists that the organization is fine; it was just one bad apple. As I recall, the Times editorial page did not accept that explanation when Merrill Lynch said it about Henry Blodget.

Raines' behavior is far worse than the corporate chieftains. He clearly bears the most responsibility for this fiasco, but when disaster strikes ... he blames the black kid! So far, Raines' response has been basically to say: "You try to help these people ..." (Raines' other great contribution to race relations was his unintentionally comical magazine piece about his black maid, "Grady's Gift.")

Put aside whether race should be used as a hiring criterion. Even people who support affirmative action don't have to support Raines' approach of refusing to hold blacks responsible for anything, from fake reporting to gang-raping a jogger in Central Park. What Raines did to Blair was cruel.

Think of it in a nonracial context: Suppose the owner of a big company sends his kid to learn the business and tells low-level managers to treat him just like anyone else. The managers curry favor with the boss by reporting that his son is doing great and is a natural genius for this business. So the kid keeps getting praised and promoted, until one day he is actually put in charge of something he has no ability to run. That is cruel. And it's the story of Pinch Sulzberger, isn't it?

[TLBSHOW]

You know the Old Gray Liar the paper that can't tell the truth unless its the top 10 of the week or maybe the TV listing and that is even giving the liar paper a point on printing.

[laurav]

Nope, I don't work for the NY Times. Let me know if you can find any Ann Coulter columns in USA Today after that one, though.

[TLBSHOW]

We need to lobby for Ann to get the first interview of Hillary on her book tour! Wouldn't she do a much better job than Diane Sawyer or Oprah? :-)

There would be no lies or spin that Ann would not catch the witch on. I like this idea. LOL

[TLBSHOW]

I can tell you where we will find Ann all Summer and that is #1 bestseller for Treason the story of liberal lies.......

[laurav]

By the way, I've been on this forum for two and a half years. I don't think a Times person would have lasted that long. Though they might... there are conservative journalists out there laboring away in the trenches. And accuracy is important, whether it's liberal or conservatives committing the errors.

[ChadGore]

[Bonaparte]

"Does anyone know if Boyd is black?"

I do. He is.

And Blair recommended him for some prize -- which Boyd subsequently received.

[Malesherbes]

Yes, Boyd is black. An earlier account said he and Blair were good friends and used to take "cigarette breaks" together. Imagine, "cigarette breaks" at the New York Times in Bloomberg's New York.

[TLBSHOW]

So comment on the fact the New York Times is filled with lies.

[laurav]

I have no doubt her book will do well. My problem with Coulter is that she's preaching to the choir by writing columns that can only be printed in conservative outlets. You know how people complain about Maureen Dowd believing it's "better to be cute than coherant?" Coulter often chooses to write zingers instead of sustained arguments. Her reporting consists of looking through Lexis-Nexis. Which is how she made those errors in the USA Today column -- she quoted from other papers without calling the sources to check the accuracy.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

You mean this kid just made stuff up and pretended that is was true? And he expected people to believe it? Who does he think he is, a college professor? You wanna act like that you better teach African Studies or Wimmin's Studies or some other fraudulent "discipline."

[laurav]

Like I said, accuracy is important, no matter who is doing the reporting/writing. I have a particular beef with the NY Times in that once they quoted me and spelled my name wrong. Elementary journalism skill -- check your source's name.

[Alberta's Child]

I have a friend who was a very good reporter for one of the big Washington D.C. papers. He left journalism entirely when it became apparent to him that "diversity" had become a roadblock to his career. He was astonished at the poor quality of the minorities who had found their way into the upper reaches of the newspaper.

But then again (to paraphrase Thomas Sowell): "Liberalism thrives in places where failure doesn't really cost anything."

[laurav]

Have you read "Coloring the News"? I checked it out of the library after this whole Jayson Blair thing broke. At many newspapers/mags, there is a Sr. VP for diversity, and at some (such as the Time Warner pubs) managers' bonuses are in part determined by how they do on promoting and hiring under-represented minorities. Net result is that good managers find good minority reporters and writers but bad managers hire and promote people for no reason beyond race.

[TLBSHOW]

Did they get your quote right?

[laurav]

For the most part, LOL. I was talking about sweatshop protesters on university campuses and saying how funny it was to see students protesting administrators, because all of them were liberals anyway.

[Alberta's Child]

I never read that book. Was that the one that was written by the guy who covered the Tawana Brawley story in upstate New York back in the 1980s, and quit his job after he told his editor that the whole thing was a hoax but was told to report on it as if it were a legitimate story?

[driftless]

I constantly find errors in columns by whomever. Most of them are minor, but even so the writers should be careful about accuracy on even minor details. However deliberate falsification ie. lying is another thing. Blair's history of ineptitude was astounding. Raines should be fired along with Blair.

[Alberta's Child]

Alex Haley won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for his book "Roots," which was later proven to be both a hoax (it had no basis in fact) and heavily plagiarized. And yet the Pulitzer Prize board has never seen fit to rescind the award.

I'm sure Haley now writes idiotic op-ed pieces in the NY Times under the pseudonym "Paul Krugman" or something like that.

[The Wizard]

once again Ms Coulter hits the nail on the head