This was a really strange read (well, the first 2 pages: as far as I got into the article when I had come expecting the news). Featured on the front page of today’s NY Times online:
CORRECTING THE RECORD
Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception
Brutal… and it’s 10 pages long :shock:
Got to self correct.
My favorite bit about this is that the right is focusing on the affirmative action diversity hire angle. Hello, being a con artist isn’t restricted to race.
I skipped to page ten and saw this:
Thomas Kunkel, dean of the journalism program at the University of Maryland, gently suggested that the former student might return to earn that college degree.
Heh… he’s half right. Time to go back to school, but I don’t think that a degree from the journalism program is going to be alot of help in finding employment at this point. In this country anyway.
Yeah, his journalism career is over. Maybe ghostwriting…
The NYT needs better accounting controls.
Expense reports not reviewed by superiors only administrative assistants.
Expense report receipts not tying to locations supposedly visited.
Mucho travel with no hotel, rental car or travel charges. Ding! Ding! Ding! I don’t know about you, but my travel expense reports are filed immediately because I want the money before my credit card bill arrives.
It’s sad. If the guy had only focused his energies on really doing his job, he probably would have been OK. Covering up for everything he was doing for that long takes alot of energy and talent.
-DavidCPA
You should hear Fox News going on about it.
His penchant for making up stories in a convincing manner should make him a shoe-in at such nationally acclaimed publications as the National Enquirer.
It’s a sad story. The guy apparently had skills, but was more keen on playing the office politics (he was very popular with most of the staff and used his allies in management as insulation against lower editors) than doing the work.
The fact that he was never reimbursed for plane tickets or would get money for a Brooklyn Starbucks when he was supposed to be in Texas is certainly curious.
I don’t think that Blair’s fraud is emblematic of any deep institutional problems, though. He was one guy who chose not to do the hard work that being a national reporter requires. That the NYT thought he had his degree is odd, but the article (only four pages in paper) makes clear that he was seen as a Golden Boy by much of the senior management. Affirmative action is a small part of this story - the Times wanting a high profile black reporter is probably not. He was pushed hard and far in spite of warnings from lower editors.
Troy
Yeah, I don’t recall lots of journalistic self-searching about being too easy on white guys when Stephen Glass cropped up.
Yeah, I don’t recall lots of journalistic self-searching about being too easy on white guys when Stephen Glass cropped up.
I have no idea if this is an affirmative action deal or not. As excited eight year olds scream while reading freeway signs in Montana, BUT! Here’s a quote from an interview with NYT EIC Howell Raines last week on the arch-conservative NPR program “All Things Considered”:
“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.”
I think part of the backlash may stem from the fact that Charles Lane never addressed the Knights of White Journalism and openly stated that the pale glow Glass cast over the New Republic’s cubicle farm was more important than his writing talent.
So to summarize:
I don’t know, Jason, you should call NPR and complain. Anyway, as a rebuttal to my post, permit me to quote the left-leaning Weekly Standard:
Since Blair’s name first appeared in the Times on June 9, 1998, he has had 725 total bylines there. His 50 corrections therefore constitute a 6.9 percent discovered-error rate. That’s not so great. But it’s not nearly so bad as the factual strikeout average posted, to take one random example, by Times Washington-bureau stalwart Adam Clymer over the exact same period: 400 bylines with 36 corrections (9.0 percent). Or how’s about Times associate editor R.W. “Johnny” Apple Jr., whose 327 bylines with 46 corrections (14.1 percent spoiled copy) would seem to label him–the numbers don’t lie–less than half as reliable a newsman as the hapless youngster Howell Raines is now banishing to Purdah.
By the way, that was from last week’s issue - before the full extent of Blair’s problems were revealed. Still, it’s a nice counterpoint to any arguments your Confederate flag waving conservative friends might holler at you in their funny Southern accents.
Yes, Jason. There are no reservations, doubts, and caveats about Affirmative Action, they are simply all 100% solid examples of how it casts a horrible shadow over all life as we know it.
<rolling my eyes>
Your extremist conclusions are as embarassing as Cookiepants’ going batshit in every single political reply. Name one person here who even remotely implied your #4 above. You didn’t even give the article’s author credit for writing that they were “interested in cultivating a young black reporter”. You just jump right into a conservative-bashing quip.
The interview with Raines is here.
You left off his response: “No, I do not see it as illustrating that point. I see it illustrating a tragedy for Jayson Blair, that here was a person, who under conditions in which other journalists perform adaquately, decided to fabricate information and mislead colleagues. And it is, I don’t want to demonize Jayson, but this is a tragedy, a failure on his part.”
That Weekly Standard article doesn’t differ between spelling and content errors, by the way. It refutes the “unjustified leniency to the black guy” theory, anyway: lots of old white guys get away with even worse, apparently.
What’s the point of Fox hammering on the affirmative action/black angle, then, if they don’t think Blair was given more leniency because he was an affirmative action hire? I’m with Chris Rock on this one:
Rock said that a black man working two jobs is exasperated to see a non-working black man.
“I got two, you can’t get one? I’d give you one of mine, but you’d screw it up and they wouldn’t hire another black man for ten years.”
It makes me wonder about other reporters at the Times, Judith Miller pointedly.
Slate discussed her here
http://slate.msn.com/id/2081774/
and here
http://slate.msn.com/id/2074921/
You left off his response: “No, I do not see it as illustrating that point. I see it illustrating a tragedy for Jayson Blair, that here was a person, who under conditions in which other journalists perform adaquately, decided to fabricate information and mislead colleagues. And it is, I don’t want to demonize Jayson, but this is a tragedy, a failure on his part.”
I’m not sure what that response adds, since it doesn’t address his original quote in which he pretty clearly states that the diversity Blair provided was “more important” than the other ways in which he made the staff “better”. It’s possible Raines was just playing to the audience in that speech, in which case he should probably just say so.
That Weekly Standard article doesn’t differ between spelling and content errors, by the way. It refutes the “unjustified leniency to the black guy” theory, anyway: lots of old white guys get away with even worse, apparently.
Which is why I referred to it as a “rebuttal”.
Ah, ok. I think it’s a bit much to think Raines was secretly revealing Blair was hired for his skin color there.
I’m going to Diversity Training on Tuesday. By Tuesday night I should have absorbed enough information to settle all issues regarding race, affirmative action and diversity raised in this thread :D
-DavidCPA
My sister is a reporter for the Boston Globe, and a lot of people there know the guy. (He originally had an internship there.) He’s described primarily as a very ambitious person who was a big suckup, and who rubbed a lot of his fellow co-workers the wrong way. A good friend of her has worked at the Washington Post for a number of years and Blair had a real rivalry of sorts going with them, which may have led to his more eggregious assaults on the truth.
Of course, for anyone following the story, this isn’t really big news I’m revealing.
You know, ignoring the whole left/right political nonsense - which should be ignored, as far as I’m concerned - this is really a dark time for journalists. This one idiot has set back a lot of the trust that people who read newspapers have in what they consider to be better reporting than other forms of media. If no less a paper than the New York Times can let someone swindle them not once but scores of times right under their noses, then it doesn’t bode well for the perception of reporters in general.
And really, there needs to be a shakeup of the Times’ leadership, or at least some really long looks at what they are doing. Blair wasn’t being especially clever about what he was doing. A quick once over of his financials would have raised a hundred red flags. If some of the higher ups had bothered to read what their middle managers were saying about him then the paper wouldn’t be in this situation. I don’t know if they were too busy being schmoozed by the guy or what, but he absolutely should have received a hell of a lot more scrutiny than he did.