PACKET EDITORIAL, May 16
By: Packet Editorial
There isn’t a newspaper in America today that isn’t looking at itself in the proverbial mirror and asking: Could a Jayson Blair happen here?
A Jayson Blair, for anyone who may have just emerged from five days in a cave, is the new shorthand for an elaborate hoax pulled off by one remarkably imaginative but thoroughly unscrupulous reporter that has the effect of not only tarnishing the image of the paper he worked for but undermining the credibility of the entire profession.
The revelation that Mr. Blair succeeded in consistently filing made-up stories, quoting sources he never interviewed or met, reporting on events he never attended, lifting entire paragraphs from stories in other papers, submitting phony expense vouchers and otherwise defrauding the editors and, ultimately, the readers of The New York Times is astonishing.
It is all the more astonishing to those of us in the profession who are out there gathering information and writing articles every day. To anyone who has performed these tasks, it’s apparent that Mr. Blair had to invest as much time and energy weaving the elaborate web necessary to carry out his deception as it would have taken to actually cover the events he didn’t bother to cover and interview the people he never bothered to interview.
This is just one of the elements that make this story so fascinating: Why go to such extraordinary lengths to be deceitful when it would have been just as easy to be honest? And this wasn’t just a one-shot deal, like Janet Cooke pulled at The Washington Post when she won the Pulitzer Prize for a story about a drug-addicted youngster who turned out not to exist. This was a painstaking pattern of deception in assignment after assignment over an extended period. Tempted though we may be to speculate about the motivation behind this sort of subterfuge, we’ll leave the analysis of this particular pathology to the behavioral experts and, perhaps, a later editorial.
Another fascinating element is Mr. Blair’s race. He’s an African American, and the top management at The Times was evidently willing to overlook a string of red flags that got placed in his personnel file including a straightforward plea from one editor that the paper stop running Mr. Blair’s stories in the interest of promoting diversity in the newsroom. Tempted though we may be to weigh in on this highly charged issue, we’ll leave the analysis of The Times’ decision to the affirmative-action experts and, perhaps, a later editorial.
In our own world of journalism, the biggest element here is the damage this incident has caused not just to The Times but to all newspapers and, by extension, to all media. This is an industry that is built on credibility and already has more than its share of critics; we tend to rank somewhere slightly above used-car salesmen and state legislators but way down below teachers, doctors and a host of other professions in terms of public trust. If The New York Times, widely regarded as the nation’s newspaper of record, can’t even control the ethical conduct of its own reporters, how can any of us put ourselves forward as exemplars of credibility?
There is one advantage, it turns out, in community journalism. If one of our reporters files a story about a school board or planning board or shade tree commission meeting he or she didn’t actually attend, we’re pretty likely to hear about it since our reporter usually accounts for anywhere from 25 percent to 100 percent of the audience at one of these meetings. This offers us some momentary solace in the wake of the Blair affair, though not a whole lot of comfort about the current condition of our civic life.
But that, too, is a subject best left to a later editorial.