NY Times lambastes one of their own

[Michael Fortson]

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 (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/national/11PAPE.html)
Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception

Brutal... and it's 10 pages long :shock:

[Jason McCullough]

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.

[Michael Fortson]

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.

[Qenan]

Yeah, his journalism career is over. Maybe ghostwriting...

[DavidCPA]

The NYT needs better accounting controls.

1. Expense reports not reviewed by superiors only administrative assistants.

2. Expense report receipts not tying to locations supposedly visited.

3. 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

[Jakub]

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.
You should hear Fox News going on about it.

[Timemaster Tim]

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.

[Troy S Goodfellow]

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

[Jason McCullough]

Yeah, I don't recall lots of journalistic self-searching about being too easy on white guys when Stephen Glass cropped up.

[Erik]

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.

[Jason McCullough]

So to summarize:

1) He was part of a diversity hiring push at the NYT.
2) No one's produced any evidence that he was actually given different standards than other hires.
3) ....
4) Therefore, affirmative action is obviously a program designed to catapult shiftless, tricky negros beyond more qualified applicants.

[Erik]

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 (http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/002/625cnjok.asp):

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.

[Erik]

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.

[voltaic]

So to summarize:

1) He was part of a diversity hiring push at the NYT.
2) No one's produced any evidence that he was actually given different standards than other hires.
3) ....
4) Therefore, affirmative action is obviously a program designed to catapult shiftless, tricky negros beyond more qualified applicants.
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.

[Jason McCullough]

The interview with Raines is here (http://discover.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.jhtml?prgId=2&prgDate=May/8/2003).

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."

[Incendiary Lemon]

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/

[Erik]

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".

[Jason McCullough]

Ah, ok. I think it's a *bit* much to think Raines was secretly revealing Blair was hired for his skin color there.

[DavidCPA]

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

[asspennies]

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.

[asspennies]

I also should mention that it really is to the Times' credit that they went full bore and really went to work, and continue to work, uncovering all that Blair did. The sort of in depth coverage of what happened shows not only the inexcusability to those in charge who should have been watching Blair more, but also the resolve of a news staff who wants this to be an exception, not a rule.

The account is distrubing, damning, and yet, also gratifying in its attempt to get the entirity of the incident - multiple bad decisions by the Times and all - out in the open, to start to re-establish trust.

[jeep]

(He originally had an internship there.)

He was also working for the Globe as of May 1st when he resigned. The Times owns the Globe, and the investigation into his work there in NYC led them to look into his work here (in Boston). The Globe (largely) swears up and down by the quality of his writing, though no one jumped to defend his character.

They had a cover story on it today, where everyone at the Globe says he was a good reporter and this one guy who was his boss at the Washington Post(?) goes on about how he was a gossip, dug into other people's stories, etc. The article also points out in kind of a vaguely-sourced way that he was known for being "sharp-elbowed," which is the same as saying:

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.

Unless he's been copying Erik's reviews again, this is nothing but a second black eye for the Globe in the last two weeks.

I was flipping channels when I came across Bob Lobel talking to Bob Ryan last Sunday...I actually thought Ryan was making a tasteless joke when he said he'd like to "smack" Jumanna Kidd (extra tasteless, given her husband's arrest for domestic assault.) I was giving him more credit than he deserved, thinking he was trying/failing to be witty, but it turns out he was just being Bob Ryan. Of course, the worst fallout from THAT incident is that we may all have to see Dan Shaughnessy on ESPN over the next few weeks.

/jeep/

[asspennies]

Unless he's been copying Erik's reviews again, this is nothing but a second black eye for the Globe in the last two weeks.

Not really - the rivalry was with Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter, not with anything he did while at the Globe.

[Dirt]

This is where he sells his story to a big publishing house and making hundreds of thousands in royalties.