Yesterday was the first time most New York Times readers will have realized the full extent of the damage that Jayson Blair and his enablers at the very top of the New York Times have done to the newspaper. To their credit, the Times’ editors have laid out the full scope of deceit and incompetence that allowed what they call this 152-year low-point to happen. But their own account is also devastating – not about the ingenious lies and fraud of Jayson Blair – but about how the New York Times is currently run and edited. What seems obvious is that Blair wasn’t that enterprising or clever; his lies were easily checked; the travel receipts he submitted were proof enough of his deception; his own editors were aware of the problems and told management; there were plenty of complaints from readers; and so on. The scandal, in other words, isn’t what an overwhelmed, twenty-something young reporter succeeded in getting away with. The scandal is how he wasn’t stopped, and despite crystal-clear warnings, was actually promoted at the behest of the highest authorities in the place: Gerald Boyd and Howell Raines. They weren’t just AWOL for this calamity; they compounded and magnified it, by promoting Blair again and again, despite their own editors’ ferocious objections and a fast-accumulating record of inaccuracy and deception.
CARDINAL HOWELL: Here’s the Times’ summary of what went wrong:
Some reporters and administrators did not tell editors about Mr. Blair’s erratic behavior. Editors did not seek or heed the warnings of other editors about his reporting. Five years’ worth of information about Mr. Blair was available in one building, yet no one put it together to determine whether he should be put under intense pressure and assigned to cover high-profile national events.
Actually, the Times’ own reporting shows that’s not entirely true. When you read the full account, it’s clear that many people not only connected the dots but put their concerns in writing – at almost every step of the way in Blair’s swift and short career. When the Metro editor can write an email that says it’s time to “stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right Now,” over a year ago, it’s inconceivable that the reporter in question should subsequently be assigned to a major role in a “flood the zone” story like the Washington sniper case. Yet that is precisely what happened. In fact, after dozens of warnings, counseling leaves and alarm bells, Howell Raines even sends Blair an email congratulating him for “great shoe-leather reporting” – for work that turns out to have been riddled with errors and fabrications! How could that happen? How does a rookie reporter, with Blair’s record, get assigned a major role in such a story, produce a front-page scoop instantly, and never have an editor ask him who his sources are? When the scoop is immediately denied, trashed and rebutted, why does it take months for this to be investigated? How does a reporter whose former editor had written a memo demanding that he be removed from writing for the Times altogether get reassigned without his subsequent editor being informed of his record? Forget the affirmative action dimension. This is just recklessly bad management. It reminds me of the Catholic Church reassigning priests to new parishes without telling the parishioners of the priest’s past. It smacks of a newsroom in which everyone is running scared of the big guy’s favorite new hire, and so no one is able to stop a disaster from happening until it’s too late. Ultimately, this scandal cannot be fobbed off on a twentysomething kid, however outrageous his sins. The New York Times’ reputation is not the responsibility of new hires in their twenties. It’s the responsibility of the editors, just as the responsibility for bad priests lies ultimately with the cardinals and bishops who hire them. In this instance, Raines is the Times’ Cardinal Law. His imperial meddling, diversity obsessions, and mercurial management style all made Blair possible.
THE RACIAL FACTOR: Raines’ rationale for not restraining, firing or disciplining Blair over a period of months is particularly revealing:
The sniper attacks in suburban Washington dominated the nation’s newspapers last October. “This was a ‘flood the zone’ story,” Mr. Roberts, the national editor, recalled, invoking the phrase that has come to embody the paper’s aggressive approach to covering major news events under Mr. Raines, its executive editor. Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd, the managing editor, quickly increased the size of the team to eight reporters, Mr. Blair among them. “This guy’s hungry,” Mr. Raines said last week, recalling why he and Mr. Boyd picked Mr. Blair. Both editors said the seeming improvement in Mr. Blair’s accuracy last summer demonstrated that he was ready to help cover a complicated, high-profile assignment. But they did not tell Mr. Roberts or his deputies about the concerns that had been raised about Mr. Blair’s reporting. “That discussion did not happen,” Mr. Raines said, adding that he had seen no need for such a discussion because Mr. Blair’s performance had improved, and because “we do not stigmatize people for seeking help.”
Stigmatize? Apart from the loopy idea that telling editors of a reporter’s track-record is somehow “stigmatizing,” am I the only person that sees a racial dimension to that word? It’s almost an admission that any criticism of a black staffer is somehow racially stigmatizing. When you hear words like that, you get a glimpse of what it’s like to live in the p.c. newsroom. Offending minority journalists is more of a no-no than allowing the paper’s reputation to hit a 152-year low. I’d go further and argue that the refusal to hold black reporters or gay reporters or any reporters to the highest possible standards is itself evidence of prejudice and condescension. Did it do Blair any good to get this kind of pampering?
NO SCAPEGOATS: But most astonishing is Arthur Sulzberger’s response to this:
“Maybe this crystallizes a little that we can find better ways to build lines of communication across what is, to be fair, a massive newsroom,” said Mr. Sulzberger, the publisher. But Mr. Sulzberger emphasized that as The New York Times continues to examine how its employees and readers were betrayed, there will be no newsroom search for scapegoats. “The person who did this is Jayson Blair,” he said. “Let’s not begin to demonize our executives – either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher.”
Scapegoats? Sulzberger is confusing two separate things. A scapegoat is someone who is blamed for something he is not responsible for. What we need in this case is accountability for what went so terribly wrong. That’s not demonizing. It’s called taking responsibility. If something like this happened in government or a major corporation, do you think the Times would editorialize that no-one in the bureaucratic hierarchy should be held responsible? Of course not. They’d be clamoring for resignations. Yes, Blair is ultimately responsible. No editor can be held responsible for calculated deceit by a reporter-gone-bad. But an editor can be held responsible if the problems are exposed, and he doesn’t take appropriate action swiftly or fails subsequently to monitor such a reporter very closely. These several pages of explanation and self-examination are honorable in themselves – but not if they’re a means to escape executive responsibility rather than face up to it. The only way the Times can regain its credibility with its readers is if the editor or editors responsible for the critical decisions that made this calamity possible are required to step down.
BONUS ANTI-TIMES ITEM
!: The pro-democracy opposition in Iran is outraged that the Times picked an apologist for the Islamic dictatorship to provide an op-ed on Iraq.
The Dish 