May 19, 12:34 p.m.: The Blair scandal

It’s not race but the industry’s culture that created Jayson Blair.

By: Hank Kalet
   I’ve tried to avoid writing about Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who was publicly dismissed after the paper found that he had plagiarized or simply fabricated a raft of stories over the last two years.
   But a couple of good pieces by Bob Herbert in the Times and E.R. Shipp in the Washington Post Outlook section are worth noting.
   Bob Herbert takes on what has become the subtext of the Blair scandal — that his misdeeds were tolerated because he was black. Here is the crux of his argument in four hard-hitting paragraphs:
   "Mr. Blair was a first-class head case who was given a golden opportunity and responded by spreading seeds of betrayal every place he went. He betrayed his readers. He betrayed his profession. He betrayed the editors who hired and promoted him. But there was no racial component to that betrayal, any more than there was a racial component to the many betrayals of Mike Barnicle, a columnist who was forced to resign from The Boston Globe in 1998 after years of complaints about his work.
   "Although Mr. Barnicle is white, his journalistic sins have generally — and properly — been seen as the sins of an individual.
   "But the folks who delight in attacking anything black, or anything designed to help blacks, have pounced on the Blair story as evidence that there is something inherently wrong with The Times’s effort to diversify its newsroom, and beyond that, with the very idea of a commitment to diversity or affirmative action anywhere.
   "And while these agitators won’t admit it, the nasty subtext to their attack is that there is something inherently wrong with blacks."
   Ms. Shipp’s take on the Blair scandal focuses on the changes in the news business and problems at the Times. Jayson Blair is the guilty party here, she acknowledges, but the Times — and the rest of us in this business — could have done a better job of policing itself.
   Ms. Shipp also debunks the race issue:
   "Blair is black. So are some of the editors who promoted his career. And at the top, there were relatively liberal editors, most of them white, who perceive themselves as color-blind and diversity-friendly," she writes. "When his various ‘personal problems’ arose, they wanted to do right by a guy whom one editor described as ‘young, really, really smart, very hardworking and showing tremendous promise.’ But it wasn’t Blair’s race that made him a favorite with his editors. It was his charm, his bonhomie, his ability to schmooze. I’m sure his bosses took pleasure in the fact that a young black reporter was rising in the ranks. But other talented black journalists didn’t get the kinds of breaks that Blair received at such a young age."
   The Blair scandal is not about race, but about the changing mores in this business — which rely to too great a degree on unnamed sources and which too often value speed over accuracy. Getting it first is too often prized over getting it right.
   I’d like to think, on the rather small, local level at which I ply my trade, that I retain a bit of the old-school values. But I can’t guarantee that a Jayson Blair could not pull the wool over my eyes. I can only promise my readers — and myself — that I’ll be as vigilant as I can to make it as unlikely as I possibly can.