AN OMBUDSMAN AT LAST

More good news at the New York Times. They’re getting an independent ombudsman to field reader queries and complaints. The report on what went wrong in the Blair catastrophe pulls no punches either:

“No single person, no single mistake, no single policy is responsible for the embarrassment of plagiarism and fiction that stained the journalism of The New York Times in the spring of 2003,” the three outsiders wrote, based on their interviews with many of the people who had overseen Mr. Blair’s career. Mr. Blair declined to be questioned, citing “health reasons,” according to the outside journalists. Instead, the outside journalists concluded, “a series of management and operational breakdowns made it possible for a junior reporter in his mid-20’s to get past one of the most able and sophisticated newspaper editing networks in the world.” “Behind the Blair story,” they wrote, “lay a misguided pattern of tough supervision and lenient forgiveness that led to retaining him, and in fact promoting him, when at several points he was demonstrating that he was not yet ready to join the staff of The New York Times.” Indeed, less than a year after receiving “a particularly negative evaluation,” the outside journalists found that Mr. Blair was given a merit raise while covering the Washington-area sniper case.

Mr Raines, he partly responsible. If this is Bill Keller’s first real decision, it’s deeply encouraging. But Keller still seems in some denial about the role of race. He writes in a memo that the charge by “partisan” critics that race may have had something to do with Blair’s promotions is “wrong.” But Raines himself admitted it was a factor in his own tolerance of Blair. And the report says that “diversifying the staff was only one of a collection of factors” that had “propelled Blair upward toward journalistic disaster.” So it was a factor – if only one of many. Why would Keller deny something the report affirms?

DAVID HOROWITZ ON MEL: A bumper crop of new letters on the Letters Page.

DEAN’S YEARBOOK ENTRY: It’s great. And it’s real!