The Old Gray Liar (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?

ok. here you go:

COMMENTARY

Diversity's Stigma

By JASON L. RILEY

A young news reporter is sacked after editors discover he's been writing fake stories. The embarrassed publication details the deception and issues an earnest apology to readers. Then the chattering classes descend for a news cycle of navel gazing.

If the perpetrator is Stephen Glass, the white fabulist fired five years ago from the New Republic magazine, he is just another ethically challenged youngster who made some very bad decisions in life. But if the perpetrator is Jayson Blair, the black fabulist who resigned two weeks ago from the New York Times, he is an example of affirmative action run amok.

Somewhere in between the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1978 Supreme Court Bakke decision on university admissions, blacks forfeited the right to be judged by society as individuals. The most unfortunate consequence of racial preferences is not that they produce the occasional Jayson Blair. (Indeed, the existence of a Stephen Glass would seem to make that link tentative at best.) Far more troubling is that racial preferences, however well-intentioned, strip blacks of their individuality, their pride, their humanity.

Race-based policies make black achievement a white allowance and black failure a group stigma. Which is why so many black journalists hung their heads at the revelation of Mr. Blair's race. If the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule shortly on racial preferences at the University of Michigan, needs another reason to right a wrong it sanctioned 25 years ago, this is it.

Liberals have done an exquisite job of misinforming the public about how affirmative action is practiced in the real world and what's at stake in the current Supreme Court case. In university admissions, for example, they would have us believe that racial quotas are an innocuous policy of giving a slight edge to otherwise qualified blacks. This, we're told, produces "diversity," which supposedly brings its own unique (and conveniently unquantifiable) advantages to the learning process.

But in practice, the affirmative action ideal runs smack into a brick wall of black demographic realities. An elite law school like Michigan typically requires a score of 165 (out of 180) on the Law School Admissions Test and a 3.5 grade point average. Last year, 4,461 law school applicants nationwide met that criteria. Just 29 of them were black. Of course, spreading 29 qualified blacks over two dozen or so elite law schools would result in some pretty paltry numbers for the color-conscious. So Michigan's solution is to lower the entry bar for blacks.

Michigan's law school dean told the Washington Post that "If there were a way to enroll more underrepresented minorities without considering race, we'd do it. It's not that we like being race-conscious." But his comments contradict those of Lee Bollinger, Michigan's former president, who, in defense of racial preferences, has argued that diversity is as essential to a college education as the study of Shakespeare. "For our students to better understand the diverse country and world they inhabit, they must be immersed in a campus culture that allows them to study with, argue with and become friends with students who may be different from them."

That sounds like someone obsessed with racial considerations, not averse to them. Note, too, that for Mr. Bollinger, who's now head of Columbia, diversity's benefits are a one way street. After all, he's surely not suggesting that Howard University, a historically black institution, should be shut down, or that its students can't really understand "King Lear" because there aren't enough whites on campus to "argue with."

Liberals want blacks on elite college campuses for the same reason they want them on elite newspaper staffs. Their presence makes these institutions "look like America." How it makes those blacks look is at best a secondary concern. But the way in which we go about color-coding our institutions matters. The indignity of walking around a campus (or workplace) susceptible to the charge that you're only there because the standards were lowered just doesn't interest very many on the left. Instead, they push for quotas at the college level while agitating against primary education reforms -- like school choice -- that would obviate quotas.

But let's hope that the effects of preference-based racial stigmas do interest the Supreme Court, which in effect must decide if there's a constitutional justification for holding Justice Thomas's offspring to lower standards than Justice O'Connor's.

Unlike "legacy" preferences for children of alumni, affirmative action in practice is tinged with ugly inferences of genetically predisposed black inferiority. A decision to end these policies will put the educational spotlight back on grades K-12, where it belongs. But an important byproduct would be to ease the dehumanizing stigma that, among other things, forces black professionals to wince at the publicized shortcomings of a colleague who happens to be black.

Mr. Riley is a senior editorial page writer at the Journal.

Updated May 14, 2003

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