Finally, Boyd, Sulzberger and Raines realize that they haven’t actually taken full responsibility for the Blair debacle. The denial that their diversity mania had anything to do with it is not encouraging. I’d also be more confident about their “internal investigation” if they could get the spelling right in their staff email. Meanwhile, Blair’s old journalism school dean corrects the record with regard to what the Times knew about Blair when they hired him:
The first regards the paper’s assertion that “everyone assumed he had graduated” when Jayson was offered a full-time job. Jayson was not close to graduating when he received his Times internship, and, like all employers we deal with, the paper would have been aware of his academic standing. I can’t say what the paper’s editors assumed, much less what Jayson told them, when they invited him aboard full-time. Needless to say, neither the Times nor Jayson consulted the school over the offer. It’s not surprising that he took it; I would have too. But had we been asked, we would have recommended – to both Jayson and the Times – that he obtain his degree first.
But no-one asked, did they?
POSEUR ALERT: “I am writing now on a morning saturated with a fog that seems manufactured by the river just down the street. The fog swells, expands, shrinks, thickens. It conceals everything. It’s a good morning to put out a bowl of milk for Maya, my imaginary cat. I invented Maya a few years ago because, first of all, I had just been divorced, and two months of “dating” had convinced me that, to paraphrase a Russian proverb, half an imaginary loaf is better than no loaf at all. Also, I operate in complete solitude most of the time, and I am allergic to real cats. Truth to tell, I like the idea of a cat more than the actual feline entity. The cool aloof self-sufficiency of cats gets to me. They’re like those cool beautiful aloof self-sufficient women a fellow who operates in complete solitude encounters when he steps out into the world. He projects all sorts of longing onto them, and then, having eroticized reality into a vapor, is nearly undone by his own fabrications. Poor fellow! Poor cool beautiful aloof woman!” – Lee Siegel, swelling, expanding, shrinking and thickening, at Slate.
The Dish 