Jayson Blair's Book Not Selling Too Well

[Gina1201]

This is the first page from the article. To read the rest see the following: NY Times Article

Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception

A staff reporter for The New York Times committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering significant news events in recent months, an investigation by Times journalists has found. The widespread fabrication and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper.

The reporter, Jayson Blair, 27, misled readers and Times colleagues with dispatches that purported to be from Maryland, Texas and other states, when often he was far away, in New York. He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He lifted material from other newspapers and wire services. He selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not.

And he used these techniques to write falsely about emotionally charged moments in recent history, from the deadly sniper attacks in suburban Washington to the anguish of families grieving for loved ones killed in Iraq.

In an inquiry focused on correcting the record and explaining how such fraud could have been sustained within the ranks of The Times, the Times journalists have so far uncovered new problems in at least 36 of the 73 articles Mr. Blair wrote since he started getting national reporting assignments late last October. In the final months the audacity of the deceptions grew by the week, suggesting the work of a troubled young man veering toward professional self-destruction.

Mr. Blair, who has resigned from the paper, was a reporter at The Times for nearly four years, and he was prolific. Spot checks of the more than 600 articles he wrote before October have found other apparent fabrications, and that inquiry continues. The Times is asking readers to report any additional falsehoods in Mr. Blair's work; the e-mail address is retrace@nytimes.com.

Every newspaper, like every bank and every police department, trusts its employees to uphold central principles, and the inquiry found that Mr. Blair repeatedly violated the cardinal tenet of journalism, which is simply truth. His tools of deceit were a cellphone and a laptop computer — which allowed him to blur his true whereabouts — as well as round-the-clock access to databases of news articles from which he stole.

The Times inquiry also establishes that various editors and reporters expressed misgivings about Mr. Blair's reporting skills, maturity and behavior during his five-year journey from raw intern to reporter on national news events. Their warnings centered mostly on the errors in his articles.

His mistakes became so routine, his behavior so unprofessional, that by April 2002, Jonathan Landman, the metropolitan editor, dashed off a two-sentence e-mail message to newsroom administrators that read: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now."

After taking a leave for personal problems and being sternly warned, both orally and in writing, that his job was in peril, Mr. Blair improved his performance. By last October, the newspaper's top two editors — who said they believed that Mr. Blair had turned his life and work around — had guided him to the understaffed national desk, where he was assigned to help cover the Washington sniper case.

By the end of that month, public officials and colleagues were beginning to challenge his reporting. By November, the investigation has found, he was fabricating quotations and scenes, undetected. By March, he was lying in his articles and to his editors about being at a court hearing in Virginia, in a police chief's home in Maryland and in front of a soldier's home in West Virginia. By the end of April another newspaper was raising questions about plagiarism. And by the first of May, his career at The Times was over.

A few days later, Mr. Blair issued a statement that referred to "personal problems" and expressed contrition. But during several telephone conversations last week, he declined repeated requests to help the newspaper correct the record or comment on any aspect of his work. He did not respond to messages left on his cellphone, with his family and with his union representative on Friday afternoon.

[Honeykiss1974]

I saw this story this morning of Good Morning America. I didn't realize he was AfAm?

[BabyBlue91]

Additional comments have been posted here.

[AKA2D '91]

Why?

a brotha?
the embarrassment?
is it always something with 'us'?
is it a big deal when others do it?
why ya'll, why?

[FeeFee]

A brotha? Dang!!!!

[Steeltrap]

Originally posted by AKA2D '91
Why?

a brotha?
the embarrassment?
is it always something with 'us'?
is it a big deal when others do it?
why ya'll, why?

This kid clearly, IMO, was lacking something. The Internet has made it a very small world. One of the solutions is easy -- CREDIT YOUR SOURCES. I can't tell you how many times that I mention "in published reports" in stories, and communicate it to my editors.

ST
1986 print journalism graduate, University of Southern California.
1989 graduate, Maynard Institute Summer Program for Minority Journalists.
Three-time Nevada Press Association award winner.

[AKA2D '91]

Didn't he learn that, too as a journalist-in-the making?

(*sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh, aggrevated, frustrated, everthingelse-ated*)

[Steeltrap]

Originally posted by AKA2D '91
Didn't he learn that, too as a journalist-in-the making?

(*sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh, aggrevated, frustrated, everthingelse-ated*)

I don't feel sorry for the cat, either. If he did learn those lessons, they obviously didn't take.

[NinjaPoodle]

Very sad indeed.


http://www.msnbc.com/news/912116.asp
A Journalist’s Hard Fall
The New York Times confronts an embarrassing trail of deceit—and difficult questions about its own culture

By Seth Mnookin
NEWSWEEK


May 19 issue — On Sunday, the front page of The New York Times featured a uniquely embarrassing article: TIMES REPORTER WHO RESIGNED LEAVES A LONG TRAIL OF DECEPTION. The internal report took up four full pages of some of the most valuable real estate in American journalism to recount the sorry history of Jayson Blair, a 27-year-old African-American who resigned from his job as a Times reporter on May 1.

A TEAM OF FIVE reporters, three editors and two researchers uncovered dozens of errors in stories the Times had printed under Blair’s byline; the corrections for the stories between October 2002 and April 2003 alone ran almost two full pages, with offenses divided into “whereabouts,” “denied reports,” “factual errors” and “plagiarism.” The second sentence of the story read, “The widespread fabrication and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper.”
Since he began his career in journalism, Blair has been known for two things: being able to play the internal politics of an institution with uncanny skill and having a problem with accuracy. Those two traits combined in a horrible confluence for the Times. Blair’s remarkable fraud had come unraveled in late April. The editor of the San Antonio Express-News had officially requested that the Times investigate a story about the family of a missing soldier that carried Blair’s byline, a story that seemed almost identical to one the San Antonio paper had run. After being asked to produce receipts showing he had, in fact, traveled to Texas, Blair resigned; in a letter to the Times’s top editors, he apologized for a “lapse in journalistic integrity.”
Total Fiction

Sunday’s story honestly detailed the startling breakdown in communication among Times editors about Blair’s extensive—and well-chronicled—history of problems with accuracy and sloppiness. The paper was unflinching in its description of how the Times failed to track Blair’s expense reports and missed glaring warning signs along the way—like the time a national editor saw Blair in the newsroom hours after he had supposedly filed a story from West Virginia. Times metro editor Jonathan Landman was quoted as being particularly vocal about Blair; in April 2002 Landman, the Times story reports, sent a two-sentence e-mail message to newsroom administrators: “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”
But there’s plenty that the Times report, which ran under the rubric CORRECTING THE RECORD, didn’t fully explore, namely how a troubled young reporter whose short career was rife with problems was able to advance so quickly. Internally, reporters had wondered for years whether Blair was given so many chances—and whether he was hired in the first place—because he was a promising, if unpolished, black reporter on a staff that continues to be, like most newsrooms in the country, mostly white. The Times also didn’t address an uncomfortable but unavoidable topic that has been broached with some of the paper’s top editors during the past week: by favoring Blair, did the Times end up reinforcing some of the worst suspicions about the pitfalls of affirmative action? And will there be fewer opportunities for young minority reporters in the future?
“We have, generally, a horribly undiverse staff,” says one Times staffer. “And so we hold up and promote the few black staffers we have.” That’s a point other news outlets have made since Blair resigned. Executive editor Howell Raines, who declined repeated requests for an inter-view with NEWSWEEK, told NPR, when pressed about whether Blair was pushed along because of his race, “No, I do not see it as illustrating that point. I see it as illustrating a tragedy for Jayson Blair.” (Blair, whose voice mail at the Times was still active as of Saturday evening, did not respond to a message left there or on his cell phone; several sources at the Times say he is currently in a hospital setting dealing with personal problems.)
Blair’s close mentoring relationship with Times managing editor Gerald Boyd, who is also black, was not explored in depth in the paper. Blair wrote Boyd’s biographical sketch in the Times’s internal newsletter when Boyd was named managing editor. Blair was known to brag about his close personal relationships with both Boyd and Raines, and the young writer frequently took cigarette breaks with Boyd.
Questions about Raines’s management style—his penchant for giving preferential treatment to favored stars, his celebrated fondness for “flooding the zone” on big stories, severely stretching resources—weren’t addressed at all. Indeed, more than one Times staffer pointed out that the paper’s national staff would not have been in need of the services of an untested young reporter with a spotty track record had a number of veterans not been pushed out by Raines last year.
Of course, plagiarism, and even outright fraud, can occur at any news organization, and certainly the lion’s share of the blame for this scandal should fall on Blair. As commentators have noted, the normal journalistic checks and balances are put in place with the assumption that everyone—reporters, editors and readers—shares an interest in getting to the truth. “The per-son who did this is Jayson Blair,” Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in Sunday’s story. “Let’s not begin to demonize our executives.” As the Times seeks to come to grips with how this could have happened, there is bound to be a lot more soul-searching in the months ahead.

[BLUTANG]

Originally posted by Honeykiss1974
I saw this story this morning of Good Morning America. I didn't realize he was AfAm?

same here. Y'all let me know when the '03 nominations for most embarrasing one of "us" is held.

Blair formerly attended Maryland (however, didn't graduate) and this story has been hot in the campus paper. In the Diamondback his former department chair said, "I'm f---ing pissed off."

[brickhouse492]

This is really embarrasing. He's probably been doing this for quite a while. Who will trust him? Who will hire him? I'm so sorry for him. Thanks to the internet, alot of people cheat on their papers in college too. The extent of the cheating became evident to me when I was thrown into group projects.

WHAT YOU DO IN THE DARK ALWAYS COMES TO LIGHT.

[Steeltrap]

As a legitimate journalist, this stuff is so embarrassing. From the Washington Post:
washingtonpost.com

Unrepentant Blair Taunts 'Idiot' Editors
Ex-Reporter Says He Laughed When He Read The Times's Mea Culpa

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 21, 2003; Page C01



Jayson Blair is lashing out at the New York Times, saying that "racism had much more of an impact" on his career at the paper than affirmative action did and boasting about his repeated deception of Times editors.

In an extraordinary interview with the New York Observer being published today, the former reporter laughed about the Times's investigation of him and seemed angry that his serial fabrications weren't being properly appreciated.

"I don't understand why I am the bumbling affirmative action hire when Stephen Glass is this brilliant whiz kid, when from my perspective -- and I know I shouldn't be saying this -- I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism," he said. Glass, who was fired by the New Republic for inventing stories five years ago, "is so brilliant and yet somehow I'm [an] affirmative action hire. They're all so smart, but I was sitting right under their nose fooling them. If they're all so brilliant and I'm such an affirmative action hire, how come they didn't catch me?"

Times editors have denied that they treated the error-prone Blair leniently because he is African American -- although Executive Editor Howell Raines has said he might have done so subconsciously. But Blair told reporter Sridhar Pappu:

"Anyone who tells you that my race didn't play a role in my career at the New York Times is lying to you. Both racial preferences and racism played a role. And I would argue that they didn't balance each other out."

While ridiculing what he called "idiot" editors at the Times, he also said it was "kind of unfair" to blame Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd for his misconduct. He said Boyd, the paper's highest-ranking black editor, tried to block his promotion to the national staff.

The only point at which Blair, 27, appeared to blame himself was when he said he might have been too young for "a snake pit" like the Times.

But he kept returning to the question of race, telling the Manhattan weekly: "I was under a lot of pressure. I was black at the New York Times, which is something that hurts you as much as it helps you. I certainly have health problems which probably led to me having to kill Jayson Blair, the journalist. . . . So Jayson Blair the human being could live, Jayson Blair the journalist had to die."

Blair did not criticize metropolitan editor Jonathan Landman, who tried to help the reporter but told his bosses in an e-mail 13 months ago that they had to stop Blair from continuing to write for the Times. But he said Landman, whom he called an honorable man, refuses to believe that some of his subordinates are "racist." Blair added that "there are senior managers at the New York Times who want African American reporters to succeed, and there are hundreds of white junior managers who resent that and don't."

Blair has been at the center of a fierce, racially charged debate over how badly the Times handled the lies and plagiarism that led to his May 1 resignation. In a 7,000-word mea culpa, the paper said Blair had fabricated 36 stories -- including one that featured the father of rescued POW Jessica Lynch choking up, complete with an erroneous description of his West Virginia home because Blair had lied about being there.

When the Times investigation was published, Blair said, he "just couldn't stop laughing" because his description of the West Virginia home had been so far off from reality.

Blair dismissed the notion that senior editors had protected him, rattling off the names of Raines, Boyd and others who he said never helped him, including a female editor whom he described as caring only about pretty Jewish girls.

Observer Editor Peter Kaplan said Blair appeared "deeply angry" at the Times. "He seems to have obscured his own moral lapses in what he did, in deference to the racial injuries he feels he suffered."

Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said yesterday that the paper would have no comment. But in a memo yesterday, Raines and Boyd said they planned to demonstrate "our absolute determination to change the way this newsroom works," including the hiring of 20 more people to ease workloads at the paper. They also said, in response to complaints about a top-down management style, they would "push authority on news coverage and staff assignments down to the department heads" and "work with them in a consultative way on matters of news judgment and deployment of resources."

Describing himself in the Observer interview as having struggled with alcohol and cocaine since he was a teenager, Blair said he botched the coverage of a 2001 benefit concert, which required two corrections, because he was drunk on assignment.

Blair maintained that his web of lies started in earnest in January and that he had fudged the facts perhaps five times before that. However, The Washington Post has reported that he badly distorted an interview done for him in 2000 by a Times freelancer, Lisa Suhay, and threatened to get the paper to drop her if she didn't stop pressing for a correction.

The Post has also reported that in 1999, while working as an intern at the Boston Globe, Blair faked an interview with D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams. Blair told the Observer that his former Globe colleagues were "a bunch of thin-skinned, sheltered, cocooned babies."

Blair was more restrained in a separate statement to CNN on Monday, saying he is "sorry" and wants to write his story -- he has hired an agent to entertain book and movie offers -- so that "others will learn from my mistakes." But, he said, "there are many assumptions being made, that because I'm black, Gerald Boyd was my mentor, and because my closest friend, Zuza Glowacka, is Polish, I was trying to gain favor with Howell Raines. People will be surprised when the whole story comes out.' " Glowacka, a Times clerk who has resigned, is a friend of Raines's wife, Krystyna Anna Stachowiak.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[CrimsonTide4]

[CrimsonTide4]

[Steeltrap]

But I would love to see Jayson Blair's butt kicked.