The Dish

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.

An array of damning details is emerging. More, no doubt, will come. From the L.A. Times:

By the Times’ account, Boyd was head of a committee that recommended Blair be hired, despite the reservations of other editors. Boyd, along with Raines, pushed the inexperienced reporter with a poor record onto the prestigious national staff. What the Times does not note is that in 2001 it was the tyro Blair who nominated Boyd for the National Assn. of Black Journalists’ journalist of the year award for his role in producing the Pulitzer Prize-winning series “How Race Is Lived in America.” When Boyd subsequently was promoted to managing editor, according to sources at the Times, Blair was selected to write the announcement for the paper’s in-house newsletter.

From the indomitable Seth Mnookin:

Blair wrote Boyd’s biographical sketch in the Times’s internal newsletter when Boyd was named managing editor. Blair was known to brag about his close personal relationships with both Boyd and Raines, and the young writer frequently took cigarette breaks with Boyd.

From the Mickster, describing how Raines’ reporter shortage (which made it useful to assign Blair to the sniper story) contributed structurally to the problem:

Here are some people who have left (whether or not they were pushed): Kevin Sack, Sam Howe Verhovek, Evelyn Nieves, Carey Goldberg. James Sterngold, and Blaine Harden…. As a result, confronted with two journalistic wars (in Iraq, and the streets around Washington, D.C.) Raines, like Donald Rumsfeld, discovered he didn’t have enough troops!

Actually, I think the church metaphor is better. When you have a shortage of priests (because of your own policies), you tend to overlook the failings of the few you still have. Mickey argues that the “NYT story itself makes out a prima facie case of editorial negligence against Raines.” I’d agree. That’s why I don’t agree with Mickey that Raines’ job is not in jeopardy. Like Cardinal Law, Raines only has to please one man – the NYT’s Pope. But also like Cardinal Law, if the clergy really feel that this has destroyed their credibility, won’t they demand a clean break? Or put another way: wouldn’t it be truly odd if what the NYT itself describes as its worst moment in 152 years didn’t result in someone in authority taking real responsibility?

“I think the direct case against Raines in the Jayson Blair episode is even stronger than the one you make.-This isn’t about an abstract system failure. I don’t even think motivations are the issue.-It’s about specific, arrogant, arbitrary acts by Times executives that defied the Times’ own internal controls.
Up to the moment Blair was transferred to the National Desk, it looks like all the normal Times internal systems were working – problems with the otherwise-promising Blair had been identified, he had been counseled and kept on a short leash, and having completed “probation” he was being transferred to the Sports desk where he could at least do no harm.-
-Then suddenly – and even the Times’ self-examination makes this seem like a kind of immaculate conception – Blair is lifted out of the Sports desk and thrust into the sniper story. You’ve got the money quote in your post:-It’s Raines’ decision to be the angel for Blair’s career, and it’s Raines’ decision, scandalously, to deceive his staff and not tell Blair’s-new editor, Roberts, about his past problems.-That’s not a “contributing factor,” that’s the unambiguous cause of the problem.
-I almost don’t care-what Raines’ policies or intentions were.-There’s no reason why affirmative action can’t coexist with performance accountability, and in fact exactly that seemed to be the “normal” system at the Times.-What happened was a product of-Raines’ personality and decisionmaking style – arbitrary, unaccountable, with a dose of almost feudal personal favoritism.-It’s classic, dysfunctional, management-by-whim. This is squarely Raines’ screw up as an executive.” That nails it, I think. I think we can measure the future credibility of the Times by whether Howell Raines remains as executive editor. More feedback on the Letters Page.

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.

“Mr. Blair’s Times supervisors and Maryland professors emphasize that he earned an internship at The Times because of glowing recommendations and a remarkable work history, not because he is black. The Times offered him a slot in an internship program that was then being used in large part to help the paper diversify its newsroom.” – from today’s New York Times. So what was it? Diversity or ability? And if his professors were so impressed, why didn’t Blair manage to graduate? Either the Times editors are completely incompetent at judging journalistic skills; or they judge reporters on the basis of their race. Neither conclusion is particularly edifying, is it? Coming Monday: “flood-the-zone” coverage of the Raines-induced meltdown at the New York Times.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “As a denizen of much-denigrated Fleet Street – and the tabloid end, too – I have only three initial things to say about this sorry episode: Ha! Ha! Ha! There’s got to be a great movie script in here. But it would never be made because Hollywood suffers from the same urge to mouth racial platitudes as the NYT does in its pages and hiring policies. It could never happen here in London. Why? Because other, scooped reporters who had been beaten on stories by what we call a “make-up merchant” would have grassed him up to organs like Private Eye. The whole thing has enabled us all to laugh heartily at the haughty Olympians of the NYT. And for that we should be very, very grateful.” – from a gloating British hack.

SUDDENLY: Being barred from writing for the New York Times by Howell Raines feels like a huge compliment.

I’ve just read through the seemingly endless litany of errors, fraud, plagiarism and lies from Jayson Blair. It strikes me that his offenses may be even worse than Stephen Glass’s. The most striking thing to me was how obvious the plagiarism was, and how many times Blair’s datelines were completely fabricated. Did no one use a quick Nexis search to check for plagiarism? Did any of the plagiarized complain? And how do you lose track of where your reporter actually is – not just once, but many, many times? This is surely far worse than anyone has hitherto realized: a web of deception that takes the Times almost 7,000 words to parse and correct. And the reckoning still may not be complete. I’d say it’s the biggest blow to the credibility of newspaper journalism since the Janet Cooke affair. But will anyone apart from Blair be held responsible?

“Would Jason Blair have been “caught” earlier if he had been white?-This is not something a liberal Southerner like Howell Raines would-ever like to admit, but it is a question that must-be asked. Indeed, Raines seems to be-hanging Blair out to dry all by himself-for what MUST be-an institutional problem. Students in my journalism class ask-the right question-right away: “Why wasn’t this pattern SEEN?”-When Terence Smith put that same question to Raines in his interview on the News Hour, Raines-sidestepped-it.-The editing process at the Times, he says,-is multi-layered and designed to ferret out deliberate deception. This does not answer my students’ question. It is juse an excuse.
-Entering this taboo territory of racial cutting-slack would make an interesting story for a journalism review: It would involve interviewing black reporters about-the pressures they may feel under, about the reluctance of white editors to call them to account (especially when they are charmers and suckups as Blair seems to have been), -about special pleading and special deals made for those whom Raines has called – and I paraphrase from Terence Smith’s quote on the News Hour interview – “just the sort of person the Times is looking for” as a reporter.- And it would involve some statistics checking: Has the Times dismissed anyone else with similar or higher records of inaccuracy?-Who?
-You cannot have 1,000 journalists in a building – people trained to sniff out problems – and-MISS this problem unless-there were-some kind of cultural blinkering going on.-
That’s the real soul-searching that needs to go on at the Times. From Raines initial comments, it’s not happening.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

To their great credit, the New York Times has responded today at length to the frauds perpetrated in their newspaper by one Jayson Blair. Money quote:

A staff reporter for The New York Times committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering significant news events in recent months, an investigation by Times journalists has found. The widespread fabrication and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper. The reporter, Jayson Blair, 27, misled readers and Times colleagues with dispatches that purported to be from Maryland, Texas and other states, when often he was far away, in New York. He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He stole material from other newspapers and wire services. He selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not. And he used these techniques to write falsely about emotionally charged moments in recent history, from the deadly sniper attacks in suburban Washington to the anguish of families grieving for loved ones killed in Iraq.

So far, around half of Blair’s 73 articles have been found to be tainted in some way. I think Howell Raines has behaved impeccably in response to this, just as Charles Lane at The New Republic became a real hero in his confrontation with the last fabulist, Stephen Glass, in similar circumstances. The truth is: if someone truly is committed to perpetrating fraud, it’s hard to prevent it. You can’t have minders for every reporter in the field. All you can do is correct, apologize, and then figure out some ways to tighten the net. Affirmative action might have had something to do with Blair’s long run of error; but it didn’t explain Glass. Charm can be these fraudsters’ strongest weapon. Unfortunately, it seems that some of this in Blair’s case was preventable:

The Times inquiry also establishes that various editors and reporters expressed misgivings about Mr. Blair’s reporting skills, maturity and behavior during his five-year journey from raw intern to reporter on national news events. Their warnings centered mostly on his struggle to make fewer errors in his articles. His mistakes became so routine, his behavior so unprofessional, that by April 2002, Jonathan Landman, the metropolitan editor, dashed off a two-sentence e-mail message to newsroom administrators that read: “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”

The Times will now have to figure out why it took them another year before that happened.

THE GOP CHOICE: Two stories: one about Log Cabin Republicans meeting the administration, engaging the Bushies and affirming the right of gay Republicans to be in the party. Meanwhile, RNC Chair Marc Racicot, who definitely is an inclusive man, has to endure a religious right inquisition, in which he has to tell his questioners about his precise views on gay male sex. The divide couldn’t be starker. Or harder, at this point, to bridge.

AN A.P. CORRECTION: This one’s a beaut:

In a May 6 story about Arabs’ “right of return” to Israel, The Associated Press erroneously reported that 4 million Arabs fled the war that followed Israel’s creation in 1948. About 700,000 to 750,000 Arabs are believed to have fled or were expelled from the territory that became Israel in that war, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Today, surviving refugees together with their descendants are estimated by UNRWA to number about 4 million.

How many treasures were stolen from the Baghdad museum again?

“RECKLESS” NUDITY: A new British legal standard.

Marguerite Kelly writes a column so honest, so humane, so moving, it makes you realize why her son was as good a writer as he was.

An amazing Freudian slip from the New York Times’ executive editor. He even held Jayson Blair up as an exemplum of the New York Times’ priorities. Ouch.