← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · TexasAnarch
Thread ID: 6553 | Posts: 10 | Started: 2003-05-08
2003-05-08 13:29 | User Profile
They must find out who this guy is linked to, and tell us. He can't have just popped up like popcorn. Could be a big break for pinning arch-criminality on Raines et al, especially if he is a Jew. And knew Frum, or the rest.
More Reporting By Times Writer Called Suspect Parents of Two Other Soldiers, Attorney in Sniper Case Say They Never Spoke to Blair
By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, May 8, 2003; Page C01
Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who resigned last week after plagiarizing a story about a woman whose son died in Iraq, never talked to two other soldiers' parents he quoted in separate articles, the parents said in interviews this week.
The Rev. Tandy Sloan, an associate minister at a Cleveland church whose son was killed in Iraq, said he did not meet or speak to Blair, despite the fact that the reporter published his comments and described him at a church service.
"The article he wrote was totally erroneous," Sloan said. "He hadn't talked to me. He fabricated the whole story, is basically what he did."
Gregory Lynch, the father of Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the former POW who was rescued by U.S. forces, said Blair "was never at my house and never spoke to me." Blair had begun a story in March -- datelined Palestine, W.Va. -- by writing that Lynch "choked up as he stood on his porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures, and declared that he remained optimistic." No tobacco fields or cows can be seen from the house, Lynch said, only a couple of chickens.
An attorney in the Washington sniper case quoted by Blair also said he never spoke to the reporter. And Pete Mahoney, associate athletic director at Kent State University, said a quote that Blair attributed to him in December was "very embarrassing," and although the reporter had left a message for him, "I never had a chance to talk to him."
These accounts indicate that the story that prompted Blair's resignation, far from being an isolated incident, was part of a pattern in which the 27-year-old reporter repeatedly fabricated material for Times stories.
Times Executive Editor Howell Raines said yesterday that it was "a maddening situation when you have someone who violates professional ethics. It's really stricken all of us." He said he has five reporters and three editors investigating Blair's stories over the past four years, which included 50 corrections, by reinterviewing sources and examining travel and phone records.
Raines said he has "serious doubts -- and that's an understatement" that Blair visited some of the cities he claimed to be writing from.
"I wish we had caught it earlier, but we didn't," Raines said. "Frankly, no newspaper in the world is set up to monitor for cheats and fabricators."
Jonathan Landman, the paper's metropolitan editor, said Blair was hired as part of an intermediate reporter program in 1999, after a summer internship the year before, and that the paper had been aware of his substandard record.
An editor at the Boston Globe, where Blair had previously interned, told the Times that Blair's work had been good but that he had "very sharp elbows and was not liked by the other interns," Raines said. At the Times, he said, Blair "became a very popular and well-liked figure among his peers."
From 1998 to 2000, Raines said, Blair's annual correction rate ranged from 5 to 6.3 percent -- high enough to bring explicit warnings that he had to improve.
Blair graduated from the apprentice program in 2001. Still, Landman said, he wrote Blair an "unusually long, unusually detailed" letter early last year that "gave a great deal of attention to his corrections and his erratic behavior -- not showing up, being unreachable."
Landman said he also told Blair in a letter one year ago that, "in essence, your job is to learn to do things right. The idea was to slow him down and make him focus on accuracy," even if he wrote only one brief story a week.
But there were more problems. Blair's correction rate shot up to 16 percent in an eight-month period beginning shortly before Sept. 11, 2001, when Blair lost a relative in the attack on the Pentagon. Raines said he entered the employee assistance program for several weeks.
..truncated
2003-05-08 14:01 | User Profile
Blair is black. And his meteroic rise can be attributed to that. Minority journalists are pushed into the big time long before they are ready. Just a few years ago he was submitting stuff to the Washington Post's suburban editions. And somehow he ends up covering the sniper story for the Times.
This screwball is not only lacking in character he is lacking in brains. How in the hell he thought he could publish something in the Times that wouldn't be seen in Texas or wherever he purloined the story from tells you a lot about his grey matter and how cocky he was.
His sniper coverage was all lies too.
Howell Raines will never live this down.
2003-05-10 11:15 | User Profile
The scribblin' nigra was probably in a strip club or back at his crib smoking a blunt when he said he was on Mr. Lynch's front porch.
:afro: = :dung:
2003-05-12 02:07 | User Profile
Are we prescient, or what?
Today's Sunday Times, page 1, top left "Times Reporter Who Resignedd Leaves Long Trail of Deception", followed by two full-page 5-column top-to-bottom each article, tracking down the (shudder) sorry trail. Findings:
"To the best of my knowledge, there has never been anything like this at the New York Times," said Alex S. Jones..."There has never been a systematic effort to lie and cheat as a reporter at the New York Times comparable to what Jayson Blair seems to have done."
Same language is quoted as having been used indignantly by Howard Raines: "There was no inkling, Mr. Raines said, that the newspaper was dealing with "a pathological pattern of misrepresentation, fabricating and deceiving."" Well, not exactly. At the time he was given responsibility for leading the coverage in the sniper investigation, much, much documentation existed of undisclosed "personal problems", instability, out-of-contol arrogant attitudes, backed by apparent confidence of being protected by hi-ups.
He was promoted by "Mr. Boyd, who is now managing editor, the second highest ranking newsroom executive...said last week that the decision to advance Mr. Blair had not been bsed on race. Indeed, plenty of young white reporters have been swiftly promoted through the ranks."
"To say his promotion was about diversity in my view doesn't begin to capture what was going on," said Mr. Boyd, who is himself African-American." (I'll bet.) "He was a young, promising reporter who had done a job that warranted promotion."
Well, anyone can read what he did. The question from my earlier post remains: if the lying and deception was systematic, what did the pattern add up to, and who did it favor? We know that blacks are used as ZOG political 'minority' front -- the sinful, criminal ones, if you want to hate somebody non-white -- is there such an invisible hand here? The last paragraphs hint at something:
"Mr, Raines, who referred to the Blair episode as a "terrible mistake," said that in addition to correcting the record so badly corrupted by Mr. Blair, he planned to assign a task force of newroom employees to identify lessons for the newspaper. He repeatedly quoted a lesson he learned long ago from A.M. Rosenthal, a former executive editor.
"When you're wrong in this profession, there is only one thing to do," he said,"And that is get right as fast as you can."
ah hm.
(Last par. read: "For now, the atmosphere pervading the newsroom is that of an estranged relative's protracted wake.")
2003-05-12 20:27 | User Profile
Howell Raines is a damnable liar.
[url=http://www.timeswatch.org/articles/2003/0509.asp]http://www.timeswatch.org/articles/2003/0509.asp[/url]
Times Watch for 05/09/03
Raines: Diversity ââ¬ÅMore Importantââ¬Â Than Better Journalism
2003-05-12 20:40 | User Profile
This is pretty funny. Of course, the nig-scribber was coddled because he was black. Blacks are a race of children, whether they work for the Times or sell crack in Bed-Stuy.
MAY 12, 2003 The Blair Watch Project 14 Unanswered Questions in 'NY Times' Jayson Blair Probe
By Greg Mitchell
While thorough and, some might say, courageous, the mammoth report in yesterday's New York Times on the Jayson Blair scandal left many questions unanswered, most notably: How did he really get away with his evil ways for so long? But there were at least 14 other issues, big and small, left unresolved by the Times' investigators, to whit:
Size matters? As a student journalist and intern "the short and ubiquitous Mr. Blair stood out," according to the Times' report. This begs the question, how "short" does one have to be to stand out?
Race matters? Times' supervisors emphasized that Blair earned an internship at the paper in 1998 "because of glowing recommendations and a remarkable work history, not because he is black." But then, in the very next sentence, we learn: "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."
Who knew the Times was that wacky? "There are many eccentric people here, but they've earned it," Jerry Gray, an editor, informed Blair in 1999.
Maybe he should try the "Cheez Doodle Defense"? Another editor, Charles Strum, said, "I told him [Blair] that he needed to find a different way to nourish himself than drinking scotch, smoking cigarettes and buying Cheez Doodles from the vending machine."
A surefire way to get promoted at the Times? "Mr. Blair continued to make mistakes, requiring more corrections, more explanations, more lectures about the importance of accuracy. Many newsroom colleagues say he also did brazen things, including delighting in showing around copies of confidential Times documents, running up company expenses from a bar around the corner, and taking company cars for extended periods, racking up parking tickets. ...In January 2001, Mr. Blair was promoted to full-time reporter...."
Maybe they want to correct that? About midway through the Times' opus we are told, "When considered overall, Mr. Blair's correction rate at The Times was within acceptable limits." However, a few sentences later, the report quotes a January 2002 evaluation of Blair by Jonathan Landman, metropolitan editor, noting that his correction rate was "extraordinarily high by the standards of the paper."
Does stop mean go at the Times? In April 2002, we learn, Landman sent a two-sentence e-mail to newsroom administrators: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now." This plea would go unheeded for more than a year.
Stop him before he kills again. A few months later, when Blair got briefly shuttled to the sports department, Landman recalls warning the sports editor, "If you take Jayson, be careful." Maybe the sports editor thought Landman meant "be careful to stock the vending machine in the sports department with Cheez Doodles." In any case, Blair was soon promoted to covering the top U.S. story of the time -- the D.C. area sniper shootings.
Sock it to him? After weeks of corrections and complaints about Blair's coverage of the sniper shootings, Jim Roberts, national editor, was finally warned about his "record of inaccuracy" and that he needed to be watched. Roberts, of course, did not pass this warning on to his deputies. "It got socked in the back of my head," he explained last week.
License to thrill. By this time, other Times editors had managed to form their own assessments of Mr. Blair's work. Apparently they considered him "a sloppy writer who was often difficult to track down and at times even elusive about his whereabouts." On a more positive note, "he seemed eager and energetic." Did it occur to anyone that eagerness and energy might be precisely the two qualities you would NOT want in a sloppy writer who no one can ever find?
Blanket pardon? On an expense report filed this past Janaury, Blair said he bought blankets at a Marshalls store in Washington. A check of the receipt (much) later showed that the purchase was made at a Marshalls in Brooklyn. Forget the geographic obfuscation -- does Times policy allow employees to put in for household items?
Overstatement of the year? "Man, you really get around," a fellow reporter e-mailed Blair this spring.
Why wouldn't they card him? "Mr. Blair did not have a company credit card," the Times report revealed, but "the reasons are unclear." Wait a minute, the Times investigators can trace the purchase of blankets to a store in Brooklyn but can't explain why Blair did not have a company credit card?
And who, disguised as Clark Kent... Between October and April, Blair filed articles from 20 cities in six states but did not submit a single receipt for a hotel room, rental car or airplane tickets.
Source: Editor & Publisher Online
2003-05-13 00:44 | User Profile
Aw, don't be so hard on Mr. Blair. He was only following the example of the greatest negro of all, Martin Luther King, Jr. What other example does a young , ambitious black have to emulate?
[QUOTE]Race matters? Times' supervisors emphasized that Blair earned an internship at the paper in 1998 "because of glowing recommendations and a remarkable work history, not because he is black." But then, in the very next sentence, we learn: "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."[QUOTE]
If the NYT really wanted diversity, they would start hiring paleoconservative white reporters.
2003-05-13 01:58 | User Profile
The only thing that anyone at the NYT is sorry about is the fact that Blair (hence, the Times itself) was caught with his baggies around his ankles, the "stank" from his hang low noticable to the general public. Raines may not live this down, but he will continue onward and upward.
Blair? He'll land on his Nike's, and walk into some cushy job. Just you wait. After, of course, touching follow up stories on Nightline and 20/20 that show how hard his ghetto upbringing was (whether or not he really grew up in the 'hood) , his battles against racism, the constant pressure he endured while having to be twice as good as thinly talented whites who just walked in off the street and were hired by the NYT. As silly as this sounds, the shows are in the works already. His phony mea culpa will hit the airwaves, and somehow it will be twisted to make whites responsible for the sad story of Mr. Blair. Whites will then be excoriated into having to do more, to make sure that something like this doesn't happen again. Meanhwile, Mr. Blair will light up a fat one, and have a big laugh to go with his big paycheck.
2003-05-13 03:39 | User Profile
I can only judge this by what I saw happen after Marv Albert was revealed to be a cross dressing butt biting rapist. He was kept out of sight for a couple of years, put back on TV with no fanfare. Then he ended up covering the NBA on national television within another year or so. But he is a jew, and the tribe will get much more kid glove treatment than a brother. But Roy may be on to something.
2003-05-14 15:51 | User Profile
Now the feds are sniffing around Mr. Blair (Drudge has the info). Jeez. That's probably a wee bit over the top. I'd like Blair and his kind deported, but I wouldn't wish an FBI investigation on the poor guy, for heaven's sake.