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Thread ID: 6805 | Posts: 14 | Started: 2003-05-20

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il ragno [OP]

2003-05-20 01:22 | User Profile

As this story develops, it strikes me that we've [color=blue]all [/color]worked with "Jayson Blair"....the AA-hire/social-promotion with little merit and no shame, who walk in the first day on the job convinced if they [color=blue]don't [/color]own the business after two weeks, it's definitely racism at work. Guys like this are working Whitey from kindergarten on....even when they're [color=blue]given [/color]opportunities they clearly haven't warranted, [color=blue]you-a-raciss [/color]is always Plan B, close at hand. They know that YOU know you cannot afford to be accused of racism; it's that simple. As you read this story and the fairly blunt quotes about Blair from his associates, think for a moment at how scathing and vicious those quotes would be (every one for, and on, the record!) if he were [color=blue]white[/color].

In the end, Blair's fatal flaw - and the most maddening aspect of this scandal - is....like many thousands of Professional People of Color, he didn't understand that [color=blue]no one was fooled for a second [/color]by his act.....they simply didn't want their [color=blue]own [/color]livelihoods curtailed by drawing the short straw and having to say what everybody else already knew, thus becoming the White Racist Pinata Of The Week in corporate America. Bongonians like Blair walk around for days with toilet paper stuck to their shoes, imagining themselves one up on Whitey -when Whitey's just waiting for the inevitable sound of a self-satisfied, incompetent ni**er con man tripping over tangled Charmin and plummeting down a flight of stairs to make it Official.

[url=http://www.msnbc.com/news/914096.asp?0nw=n2d#BODY]http://www.msnbc.com/news/914096.asp?0nw=n2d#BODY[/url]

[color=purple][SIZE=3][font=Times] Times Bomb [/font][/color][/SIZE] *An ambitious reporter with a troubled relationship to the truth meets an aggressive editor eager to mint new stars. Inside journalism’s perfect storm. * A NEWSWEEK exclusive by Seth Mnookin

  [color=red]May 26 issue —  The executive editor of the New York Times, Howell Raines, was walking down the street in Times Square, preparing for one of the most difficult meetings of his life.

      IT WAS WEDNESDAY, May 14, and Raines, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman and publisher of the Times, and Gerald Boyd, the managing editor, grinned gamely for the cameras as they made the short trip from the Times’s West 43d Street newsroom to a nearby Loews Astor Plaza movie theater. For Raines, it was a session that could determine the course of the rest of his career, a bitter and angry showdown with a staff that had been roiled by the revelations that Jayson Blair, a 27-year-old reporter, had lifted quotes, made up scenes and faked interviews—all in the pages of the most powerful newspaper in the world. Inside the theater, Sulzberger brought a stuffed moose to the stage, a Times symbol that signifies a commitment to talking about the obvious, and obviously uncomfortable, issues on the table. Raines, in his opening remarks, tried to pre-empt some of what was coming. “You view me as inaccessible and arrogant,” he told his staff, according to the Times’s own printed account of the meeting. “I heard that you were convinced there’s a star system that singles out my favorites for elevation. Fear is a problem to such extent, I was told, that editors are scared to bring me bad news.” Raines also said that if he looked into his heart, his guilt as a white man from Alabama had something to do with why he gave Blair, a black reporter from Virginia, second and third and fourth chances. Still, emotions were raw—the metro staff in particular was in a mini-revolt, with reporters and editors bitterly complaining about the lack of leadership that got the paper into its mess. Joe Sexton, a deputy editor on the metro desk with a famously foul mouth, swore; Raines slapped him down brusquely. Finally, Alex Berenson, a business reporter, asked the question he’d ask of any other top executive: Was Raines going to resign? The answer: No.

   As the Times meeting was unfolding, Jayson Blair was holed up in an apartment in Manhattan, talking with his lawyer and his literary agent. The week before, friends say, Blair had checked himself out of Silver Hill, a tony inpatient hospital in New Canaan, Conn., where he had been receiving treatment for a history of alcoholism, cocaine abuse and manic depression, NEWSWEEK has learned. Blair says he’s been clean and sober for more than a year, but even he knew his behavior had become blindingly self-destructive. Most of the few remaining friends Blair has—almost everyone he knows is a journalist or a source—were telling him to go back into the hospital, to quit working the angles for one last payday. His world was shrinking—down to a dwindling number of longtime friends; his girlfriend, a former Times clerk who had taken a leave the day after Blair resigned, and the opportunists crawling all over a journalistic scandal that was dominating talk radio, cable news channels and Internet chat rooms. He was following his own story, and phoned friends after the meeting for a fill on what went down. At 9:45 that night, Blair sent out a shockingly blithe e-mail to a number of acquaintances, including people at the Times. “hey folks,” Blair wrote, “this is my new email address. feel free to forward it to anyone who asks to reach me. spread the word to those who still care that i am holding up as well as possible and love so many of you. I [sic] time will come for more, but it’s not here yet. all the best, jayson.”

THE CHOSEN FEW This is the story of two men’s rise. Howell Raines, the swaggering, smooth-talking Southerner, had transformed the culture of the staid New York Times since stepping into the paper’s top editorial position in September 2001—elevating the chosen few, pushing his staff with an unrelenting ferocity and, in his first three months on the job, leading the paper to an unprecedented seven Pulitzer Prizes, six of them for the paper’s coverage of the September 11 attacks. Jayson Blair, an awkward, overbearing, chain-smoking cub reporter, seemed to intuitively understand this, and was gaming his way to the upper echelon of Times reporters—his personal life unraveling even as he was handed ever more prominent and pressure-packed assignments by supervisors who warned him sternly about his problems while continuing to cheer him on. Said Liz Kelley, a longtime Blair friend: “He was definitely dealing with some heavy issues, and he was getting help, through therapy and self-help programs. I don’t know how all this came about. He was self-destructing.” Raines’s fondness for anointing young reporters as future stars put the two on a collision course—which destroyed one man’s career, seriously sullied the other’s and severely tarnished the reputation of an American institution in the process.

      In a conversation with NEWSWEEK, Blair spoke of his feelings since his career went up in flames: “I can’t say anything other than the fact that I feel a range of emotions including guilt, shame, sadness, betrayal, freedom and appreciation for those who have stood by me, been tough on me, and have taken the time to understand that there is a deeper story and not to believe everything they read in the newspapers.” Or so Jayson says. As the Times found out the hard way, where Blair is concerned, it can be exceedingly difficult to determine just where fact leaves off and fiction begins.

    Ever since he first took a journalism class in high school, all Blair wanted to be was a reporter. He grew up in an upscale neighborhood in the heart of Fairfax County, Va. His dad, Thomas, is an inspector general at the Smithsonian; his mother, Frances—Fran to friends—a Fairfax County schoolteacher. At Virginia’s Centreville High School, he founded a chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and was the index editor of the school’s yearbook his senior year. But it was journalism that turned his crank. He loved knowing the secrets and the gossip; he loved trafficking in information. He loved seeing his name in print. Blair spent his days hanging out at the third-floor offices of the school’s bi-monthly student newspaper, The Sentinel, even when he wasn’t working on a story. Administrators loved him. “He charmed me from the get-go,” Pamela Latt, his high-school principal, says. “He had a very clear focus of what he wanted to do.”

‘A KID WHO WANTED TO GO PLACES’ While still in high school, Blair interned for the Centreville Times, a local weekly. “He just bounced in one day,” says Steve Cahill, executive editor of the chain that runs the paper. “He struck me as a kid who wanted to go places.” Cahill describes Blair in language similar to virtually everyone who worked with him over the next decade—he was charismatic, with an “electric smile,” but he was also unreliable. There were problems with missed deadlines, with Blair disappearing at critical times, but Cahill figured he was just a high-school student.

    After high school, Blair spent a semester at Liberty University, a Baptist school founded by Jerry Falwell. Then he transferred to the University of Maryland. “He was easy to pick out in a crowd,” Chris Callahan, the associate dean of Maryland’s journalism school, says. Callahan was so impressed he hired Blair to work for him in the Annapolis bureau of the Capital News Service. “He was completely defined by being a newshound. He didn’t know when to turn it off,” Callahan says.

    But while Blair was charming the powerful adults, he was alienating virtually everyone he worked with on The Diamondback, the student newspaper he would eventually run. His tenure as editor was marked by strife, allegations of racism, problematic stories and fantastical tales. “When Jayson was initially hired, people were really upset,” Danielle Newman told NEWSWEEK. Newman was an editor under Blair, and succeeded him after he resigned. “We said we just didn’t think he was qualified,” Newman said. There were concerns about a football game Blair covered—his story was filled with quotes from people another reporter at the game wasn’t sure existed. There was a story in which Blair tried to insert quotes from an Associated Press wire story. “We definitely had our suspicions about his reporting,” Newman says. “But what could we do?”

TALL TALES Blair’s behavior became erratic; he offered explanations that didn’t pass the straight-face test, his colleagues said. The paper was putting out a spring-break guide, and Blair disappeared without handing in a story he was working on. “We kept paging him and paging him,” Newman says. Blair didn’t show up until the next day. “He said he almost died from gas poisoning when his roommate left the burner on. At the end of the meeting ... he told me his doctor said he needed to rest. I told him to go home. After he left, someone leaned over and asked, ‘Do you believe him?’ I said no. She said, ‘Good, neither do I’.” That night, Newman and others realized the Maryland campus doesn’t even have gas stoves. Later, when Newman confronted Blair, he offered to take her to his apartment. “But when I said, ‘Let’s go now,’ he said we had more important things to talk about,” she says. Soon after, Blair resigned from the paper for “personal reasons.” Blair, who corresponded with NEWSWEEK for this article on the phone and via e-mail but refused to answer most questions on the record, did not respond to queries about his time in college, or whether he had begun to drink and use drugs during this period of his life. But one thing seems clear—Blair had already developed a reckless disregard for truth.

      From the moment Howell Raines was appointed executive editor of The New York Times, there was tension in the newsroom. Raines, who refused repeated requests for an interview for this article, had been the paper’s Washington editor and editorial-page editor, and had a reputation for being autocratic, arrogant and insensitive. He was known to cultivate stars and freeze out people he didn’t like. Many people viewed his editorial page’s attacks on Bill Clinton as unseemly. Raines didn’t seem to worry much about dissent in the ranks. He was working for a constituency of one, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the Times’s publisher, and Sulzberger, who also refused repeated requests for an interview, was an unabashed and vocal champion.

RAINES TAKES THE REINS Within days of taking the reins at the Times during the first week of September 2001, Raines led his newsroom on the story that seemed as if it would define his career. The Times dominated the coverage of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Its “Portraits of Grief” series, mini-profiles of every single victim of the attack, was seen as a way the Times continued to fill its role both as the newspaper of record and as serving the public good. “What Howell did at the paper after September 11 was heroic,” says Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic. “It was the most exemplary mixture I’ve ever seen of compassion and objectivity.”

    By early 2002, however, the paper’s staff, still exhausted from its 9-11 coverage, was being pushed beyond its limits. Raines wanted a “fast metabolism reaction to the news,” and loved to “flood the zone,” pouring enormous resources into the breaking story of the day. Newsroom staffers also felt as if Raines led the staff on crusades, obsessing about stories—like the ban on women at the Augusta National Golf Club, host to the Masters—in a way that caused the paper to make news instead of break it. (Sources at the paper say Raines nominated the paper’s Augusta coverage for a 2002 Pulitzer—which shocked some Times staffers, because the paper had come under fire for spiking two sports columns that took issue with the paper’s editorial stance on the subject.) At the time, the feeling in the Times’s newsroom was that Raines was looking for young, unmarried reporters to fill the prestigious national-reporting slots, reporters who were just as comfortable in a Holiday Inn as they were in their own beds.

 Raines certainly shook things up; by the end of the year, national correspondents Gustav Niebuhr, Carey Goldberg, Evelyn Nieves, James Sterngold, Blaine Harden, Sam Howe Verhovek and Kevin Sack had all left the paper. (Sack went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for the Los Angeles Times.) The Times’s investigative team, too, was undergoing dramatic turnover, losing two leaders in a short span. “He had no sense that there was value in having experience,” says a Times staffer. “His attitude seemed to be, ‘I’ll find someone younger and hungrier and make them better than you ever were anyway’.”

DANGEROUSLY AMBITIOUS Enter Jayson Blair, as if on cue. While at Maryland, a school from which he never graduated, Blair interned for both The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. He was not a popular guy, and had a reputation for trafficking in nasty gossip, stealing story ideas and sucking up to superiors so he could get credit for work he didn’t do. “All of us are ambitious,” one of Blair’s fellow interns told NEWSWEEK. “He was to a dangerous extent.” When Blair arrived at the Times in the summer of 1998, he came with a loaded reputation, with Globe staffers calling friends and warning them to be careful what they said to Blair.

    Almost as soon as Blair arrived at the Times, multiple sources at the paper say, he began to brag about his close relationship with Gerald Boyd, who at the time was one of the paper’s deputy managing editors. The mentoring relationship made sense, people said—one of Boyd’s responsibilities was to work with young reporters, and Boyd, like Blair, is African-American. “Jayson was always bragging, ‘Gerald told me this,’ or ‘Gerald really likes me.’ And there was no reason not to believe him,” says one reporter who has since left the Times. Boyd, for his part, says he’s never had a particularly close relationship with Blair. “I’ve had less dealings with him than I’ve had with most reporters,” Boyd told NEWSWEEK.

    During his time as an intern, Blair also seemed to have an inside track to people’s personnel files, evaluations and private notes sent between editors. Several staffers say they wondered whether Blair was looking at people’s computers after hours. While he worked in the cop shop, the pressroom at New York City’s police headquarters, Sean Gardiner, a police reporter with Newsday, said he saw Blair hack into another Newsday staffer’s computer to read a column before publication. “A lot of people thought watching Jayson was watching a train wreck waiting to happen.”

DANGER SIGNS There were definite signs that Blair was in danger of jumping the tracks. He was at a party when he was supposed to be covering a crime scene. He was drunk, a lot, telling friends he once passed out at Times headquarters and woke up there the next morning. “He drank Scotch, and he spent a lot of money,” said a waiter at Robert Emmet’s, a bar around the corner from the Times. And, friends say, he was using cocaine, at least on weekends.

    Despite the reservations of many people at the paper, Blair was promoted to staff reporter in January 2001—a promotion that occurred, according to the Times’s own account of the Blair scandal, “with the consensus of a recruiting committee of roughly half a dozen people headed by Gerald M. Boyd, then a deputy managing editor, and the approval of Mr. [Joseph] Lelyveld,” the paper’s executive editor at the time. Jon Landman, the Times’s metro editor, was quoted in the Times story as saying he had been opposed to promoting Blair to a full-time staff position, and that Sulzberger and Lelyveld had made clear the company’s commitment to diversity.

    But Blair’s performance, already spotty, seemed to be getting worse. His personal life also seemed to be spinning out of control. His apartment in Brooklyn was littered with broken furniture and rotting food, his landlord said; there was fungus, and mold. When he moved out in the fall of 2002, the place was in such sordid condition his landlord considered taking him to small-claims court to recoup damages. “It was real filth,” the landlord told NEWSWEEK. “Imagine using a bathroom for two-and-a-half years and never cleaning it.”

‘HE WAS UNDER HUGE PRESSURE’ The September 11 attacks seemed to spur Blair’s downward slide. Blair told his editors at the Times that he had a cousin who had died in the Pentagon, explaining why he couldn’t help with the “Portraits of Grief” series. In early 2002, Landman sent warnings about Blair’s behavior to Boyd and a newsroom administrator; between January and April, Blair took two leaves of absence from the paper. “Jayson was trying to get his life under control,” said one friend who has been in contact with Blair since he resigned from the Times. “He was under huge pressure, and at times he felt like he was barely holding it together, but I thought he was trying.” Blair was reassigned from the paper’s metro desk on the newsroom’s third floor to the sports desk on the fourth floor, and kept on a tight leash. “Sports writing is a supervised, confined world, and a lot of the interviewing is done in locker rooms, with crowds around,” Landman told NEWSWEEK. “I thought that would be OK.”

    But in the fall, a half year after taking a leave in the paper’s employee-assistance program and with a personnel file full of warnings and reprimands, the Times’s top editors tapped Blair to help cover the Washington sniper case. In the Times’s own account, Boyd and Raines made the decision to include Blair on the sniper team. At last Wednesday’s staff wide meeting, Raines and Boyd were asked directly who had first brought up Blair’s name. As Boyd was explaining how he had conducted a meeting in his office with several other top editors, Raines cut him off and said, according to staff members present at the meeting, “I’m the editor, it was my responsibility.” Blair, after all, knew the area, and the national desk was understaffed.

   Six days after landing in Maryland, Blair scored a front-page story. Blair wrote that an interrogation of John Muhammad, one of the sniper suspects, had been interrupted by federal prosecutors. That was true. What followed, however, was not: that the interrupted conversation had moved beyond opening pleasantries into Muhammad’s explaining “the roots of his anger.” Prosecutors hit the roof. But Blair was never asked to produce his multiple anonymous sources, and there was no discussion of pulling him off the case. (Journalists in the Times’s Washington bureau raised questions about Blair’s sniper scoop before publication, and were told by New York that changes would be made, according to several sources at the paper. But, the sources said, the changes were never made.)

    Within months, Blair was circulating drafts of a book proposal on the sniper story in which he discussed his own anger and frustration as an African-American. ”[A friend] encouraged me to look for answers about the history of violence in my own family and that of Lee Malvo [the other sniper suspect], suggesting the search would not be in vain, if it at least ended my restless angst,” Blair wrote. Later, he told friends that he identified with Malvo.

A FISTFUL OF RUNNING WATER In January, Blair had conversations with several friends in which he told them he was feeling overwhelmed and unable to cope with the pressures of his job. He went so far as to tell Jim Roberts, the Times’s national editor, that he wanted off the story, several of Blair’s friends told NEWSWEEK. Roberts says that’s not how the conversation went down, and it’s important to stress that trying to pinpoint reality when dealing with Blair is like trying to grab a fistful of running water. “Jayson and I had a conversation about whether he would return to his sports job or stay on the sniper case,” Roberts told NEWSWEEK. “He told me he had an ill uncle, and needed to spend time with him, which I’m sure is every bit as much of a lie as everything else he said.” Roberts says Blair did not specifically ask to be taken off the sniper case, and did not talk about being under too much pressure. “I told him that if he needed to attend to an ill relative we would give him some time.”

Roberts says he didn’t recount this conversation to either Raines or Boyd; he also didn’t tell the Times reporters assigned to write up last Sunday’s account of the Blair scandal about the conversation. “They didn’t ask me about it,” Roberts says. (Blair also told friends he was given a raise shortly after the conversation; Roberts says he didn’t give Blair a raise. Associate managing editor William Schmidt said he could not comment on any matter involving staff salaries.)

    Whatever transpired with his editors, friends say Blair was melting down. “We talked about his initial bout with the star system, and how that, coupled with his own pathologies, were leading him to self-destruct,” said one friend, who has known Jayson for almost a decade and spoke to NEWSWEEK on the condition his name not be used. “The drinking and the drugs were more of a symptom than a cause.”

    Over the next several months, Blair continued to get high-profile assignments from the Times, writing about the families of missing American soldiers and staying on the sniper story. He also became romantically involved with Zuza Glowacka, the Polish daughter of a friend of Raines’s Polish wife. (In a statement last week, Glowacka said, “I was in no way aware, nor did I assist Jayson in anything that contributed to his current problems.”) Unable to locate his own boundaries, Blair tried to become like the people around him. Writing about sexual abuse, he claimed he himself was a victim. “When the shuttle blew up, he said his dad worked at NASA,” said one Times reporter. “When [Gov. George] Ryan pardoned all the prisoners on death row in Illinois, [Blair] said he had a relative on death row. He said he had a cousin in the Pentagon. And when Howell married a Polish woman, Jayson found a Polish girlfriend.”

A FRAUD UNMASKED This spring, Blair pushed his deceptions to the breaking point. Staggering under the pressure of his national assignments, he stopped traveling on assignment, using his cell phone and laptop to make it seem as if he was jetting around the country. At times, he was writing from inside the paper’s newsroom. Now that his fraud has been unmasked, friends suspect he was having a manic episode. Whatever was going on, Blair was outwardly calm, even listless. Roberts says he went out to lunch with Blair in March to discuss the young reporter’s goals. “He did not seem to have any strong desires,” Roberts says. The national editor met with Blair again in April. “He seemed even more distracted, and I remember telling other people I thought that was a bit odd, because he had been so ambitious before.”

    It would soon become clear what was distracting Blair. In late April, he plagiarized a story from the San Antonio Express-News. When confronted about the charge, Blair resigned rather than produce receipts proving he had, in fact, traveled to Texas. For the week following Blair’s resignation, the scandal at the Times was a kind of low hum in the nation’s newsrooms. But the Times’s four-page report, printed on May 11, turned that hum into an all-consuming roar. Instead of answering questions about how Blair had been able to get away with so much for so long, the consensus in the newsroom was that the Times story skirted around many of the major issues—the role of race in Blair’s hiring and promotions; the lack of communication—and in some cases, acrimony—between desk editors at the Times; the imperious tenure of Howell Raines, and the institutional arrogance that led the paper to highhandedly correct the smallest errors while never bothering to address much larger thematic concerns about some articles.

    “There was all this cordwood lying around, and then along came the spark,” one Times staffer said this week. The internal investigation—and extraordinary May 14 meeting—were intended to douse the flames. To some extent, it worked: after an exhaustive week of strife, some Times men were circling the wagons, pride of place supplanting the pain the episode has caused. “A, the crime is Jayson Blair’s in the end, and B, we still put out a pretty good paper,” said metro columnist Clyde Haberman the day after the meeting. And superstar columnist Maureen Dowd faults the journalistic feeding frenzy. “They say Schadenfreude is good for your health, but this is ridiculous,” Dowd said.

    Still, embers linger. This week, a Times spokeswoman confirmed that the paper was making informal inquiries into the work of other reporters after questions had been raised about their work. More ominously, there are reports that members of the Times board are concerned about all the bad publicity. (Calls to board members were not returned.) “That’s not true,” says a Times spokeswoman. “Members of the board have individually expressed support for management and its actions.”

    Blair, meanwhile, knows his career in journalism is over. When asked if his life had become unraveled in the past year, one of Blair’s friends said, “It was never raveled. He was going to self-destruct, and he had to choose between killing himself physically or killing the thing that was causing him so much pain, his love of journalism.”

    But he is still working the angles. Blair has signed up with David Vigliano, a literary agent, and is in talks for book, movie and television deals. Ted Faraone, a PR agent who had worked with Blair on stories at the Times, told NEWSWEEK he called the reporter after reading about his career suicide. “He called me back Wednesday,” the day of the Times’s town-hall meeting, Faraone said. “He sounded in pretty good spirits, considering everything. And, you know, he needs to do something to keep body and soul together, so I put him in touch with one of my clients, Ian Rae, who did ‘A Current Affair.’ I’m hoping things work out for him.” Then Faraone added another thought. “If one thing can be said about this from a literary standpoint, the American people tend to be very forgiving if you come clean. They’ll watch the TV movie and pay $9.50 to see the feature film. It’s a strange commentary on celebrity in 21st-century America, but in a way that’s kind of how we rehabilitate people after they’ve fallen.”

With Suzanne Smalley, Rebecca Sinderbrand, Martha Brant, Holly Bailey, Pat Wingert, Jonathan Alter, Howard Fineman and Brian Braiker Click here to submit comments to Seth Mnookin

   © 2003 Newsweek, Inc [/color]

madrussian

2003-05-20 03:12 | User Profile

** he didn't understand that no one was fooled for a second by his act..... **

Could that act be a part of an image of a cool talented Negro so promoted by Hollywitz? Since even the lowest jungle habits of the Negro are to be emulated and admired, could those people be evaluating the situation and waiting when the new way of journalism/wearing pants/speaking etc. would be declared officially cool and something whites could only hope to get closer but never achieve? :afro:

il ragno

2003-05-20 03:29 | User Profile

Buried deep on page 2 of an otherwise-useless "but aren't we really all at fault here?" Salon piece are a few of the most devastating paragraphs to see print in the 21st century:

** The argument in favor of newsroom diversity suggests not only that it makes up for decades of exclusion -- an industry-wide survey from the 1950s revealed just 38 blacks were working among the nation's 75,000 newsroom employees -- but also that a newsroom more closely resembling the general population can attract a wider readership. And "diversity" does not just not mean "black"; it means more Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, gays, women, disabled people and younger people.

In 1978, the American Society of Newspaper Editors decided 2000 was the year that the percentage of minorities in newsroom jobs should match the percentage in the general population. Back then, just 4 percent of journalists were people of color, while the minority population in the United States stood at 17 percent. By 2001, newsrooms included 12 percent journalists of color, but the national minority figure had jumped to 30 percent, and ASNE announced it had pushed back its goal of diversity parity to the year 2025.

In 2002, the average percentage in the nation's newsrooms inched up to 12.5 percent. With the recent advertising slump taking its toll, some newspapers have cut back on the money they spend recruiting minorities. Still, some **top news managers know the more minorities they hire, the bigger their year-end bonus will be. At the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, as much as 15 percent of a publisher's bonus is tied to minority hiring success in the previous year, according to a report in the Columbia Journalism Review. Gannett, the country's largest newspaper company, reportedly includes a paper's coverage of minorities when considering publishers and editors for bonuses. And during the '90s, Time Inc. magazines instituted a bonus policy for its managing editors in which 10 percent is linked to how much success the managing editor of each magazine has had in hiring and promoting minorities. According to a Times spokesman, the company does use minority hiring success when reviewing job performance for managers, but there is no direct financial incentive. **

According to "The Trust," the definitive history of the Times co-written by Tifft and Alex Jones, the senior Sulzberger was also among the first big-city publishers to try to hire blacks in his newsroom. "The Trust" recounts one failed attempt that offers odd parallels to the Blair controversy. In 1945, the Times hired Fisk College graduate George Streator as its first black reporter. Streator, though, had no formal training and had difficulties at the Times. His correction file quickly expanded along with his unsatisfactory performance reviews. Soon editors discovered he was fabricating quotes, and Streator was fired. **

[url=http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/05/15/nytimes/index1.html]http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/05/...mes/index1.html[/url]

Hugh Lincoln

2003-05-20 17:27 | User Profile

Streator, though, had no formal training and had difficulties at the Times. His correction file quickly expanded along with his unsatisfactory performance reviews. Soon editors discovered he was fabricating quotes, and Streator was fired.

Damn, son. Dat nigga was oooold school, yo. He was makin' sh*t up back in tha' day.

I'm surprised at how little mention Janet Cooke is getting in all this. Her afro-unraveling didn't began until after she won the Pulitzer at the Post, and her resume turned up bogus. "Janet who?" came the response, and, as it turned out, her resume was loaded with lies. Somehow, that lead to an investigation of the story, wherein it was revealed that the 8-year-old heroin addict she so lovingly portrayed DID NOT EXIST. Bye bye, Pulitzer. Bye bye, Janet. Jews at the Post, carry on.

Then there was Globe columnist Patricia Smith, another negress, who resigned after making up quotes. Smith was nominated for a Pulitzer.

Then, believe it or not, back in high school, when I was a budding newspaper geek, our staff had to fire a black girl who wrote a movie review without having seen the movie. She protested that her mom said it was OK to do it that way.

Linder's been great on this, rightly noting that the Blair story, like a Jew-named tank driven by a gangster named Dog rolling through Iraq, so neatly encapsulates Amerikwa: The gentile frontman, the Jewish swindlers behind the scenes, the incompetent negro, and the utter inability of most to even SEE it.

Question for the race-deniers in the Blair saga: How many White 27-year-olds with no college degree and only internship experience have been hired by the New York Times?

il ragno

2003-05-20 21:19 | User Profile

e-Cage Match Matt Taibbi

[SIZE=3][font=Optima]Leave Jayson Alone[/font][/SIZE] Scandal as celebration of the status quo.

I am going to write in defense of Jayson Blair. But not for the reason I thought I would.

When I first heard about the Blair story, my very petty and adolescent initial reaction was probably the same one felt by Times haters on all sides of the political spectrum: unbridled glee and drawn-out fits of croaking, superior laughter. It couldn’t have happened to nicer people, I hissed, in the direction of anyone who would listen. It was such an occasion that I even allowed myself to indulge in a long, speculative reverie about the initial reaction to the news on the part of Times editor Howell Raines. Eventually I settled on mute, still silence, followed by an Elmer Fudd-esque involuntary unfurling of a foot-long editorial tongue, landing with a thud on his cornflower tie.

After that, I moved on to a slightly less childish hipster-media-critic stance, which I figured would be the one I’d stick with. The glib/wiseass position I planned to take here was that "Jayson Blair is a genius," a person whose amazing exploits had revealed modern news journalism for the comically primitive endeavor it is.

In so seamlessly faking so many of those sappy, rote stories with those somber titles—"A Couple Separated by War While United in Their Fears" is my favorite—Blair proved that most news journalism requires not thought or insight, but only the loosest compliance with a few very basic rules of cliche and tone.

The reason no one noticed the fakes wasn’t that Blair was a talented fraud. It was that in the context of today’s newspapers, it’s virtually impossible to spot even an obvious phony, because all newspaper writing is phony.

When there are armies of cynical, half-bright careerists cranking out fake fallen-hero or sympathy-for-the-victim stories by the metric ton—when a hundred journalists a day need multiple takes to get their tearful salutes to the troops right—how can a lone "A Couple Separated by War While United in Their Fears" possibly stand out?

It can’t, I thought, and God bless Jayson Blair for making America face that fact.

But then that position didn’t sit right with me, either. Because after listening to the Jayson Blair public outcry for a week, I found myself growing increasingly upset. Not with the Limbaugh types who hinted bluntly that this is what happens when black people are given positions of responsibility. And not even at the Times itself, which shamelessly saw fit to publish a letter to the editor from a reader congratulating the paper for its thorough self-investigation.

No, I was mad at those readers out there who fell hook, line and sinker for this media frenzy, doing as they always do, giving a scandal the disproportionate importance all scandals have.

The irony of the Blair story is that it is a story about unethical journalism that itself showed our media at its most dishonest. And no one noticed it.

The whole business of hyper-publicizing scandals is probably the oldest and most effective propaganda tactic our media uses. When our press gets hot and bothered about something, and sees a story through to its conclusion, it’s almost always after a scandal has been unearthed, some smarmy, dreary secret that some "investigative journalist" has drudged up for us to consider. Congressman fondles model on boat; mayor gives rich sanitation contract to hunchbacked brother-in-law; shotgun mic catches foreign tennis player using racial slurs. It’s always someone caught leaving the farm; it’s never the actual farm.

We get upset about these things for a few days, a week, sometimes two weeks, and they remain on the front pages until the press forces someone’s hand (a resignation, a firing, the inevitable "public apology" of the temporarily disgraced athlete before a sea of lenses).

Then the matter is forgotten, and the world goes back to normal. Placid stand-alone photos of babies and fountains reappear on the front pages. Once again it’s sports scores, features about a new supernova someone has discovered 90 billion light years away, a grainy photo of Denise Richards caught at a midtown Starbucks…

The implication is clear. When there is no scandal, the world is in equilibrium. After enough of this, we start to instinctively believe that only something that was once a secret can be scandalous. Nothing that’s right in front of our eyes is worth our outrage; there’s no need to fix anything that’s out in the open.

And that’s why AIDS or homeless kids are less important than Monica Lewinsky. The machinery of our media is only designed to attack the latter.

Sometimes, of course, uncovered secrets are actually as important as they’re made out to be. Watergate, for instance. Presidential administration conspires to undermine entire democratic process—important. Or Kim Philby, betraying the whole free world for decades: important.

But Jayson Blair? Screwed-up guy in way beyond his ken publishes numerous fake articles identical in tone and insipidity to real ones, spectacularly defaming the pompous jerks he works for, and turning himself into a Dennis Miller routine. Is that important, or just a sensational screw-up?

The additional angle put forward, of course, was that the Blair case revealed a general lack of editorial oversight in the newspaper business. That ostensibly elevated this isolated incident to the level of an "endemic problem."

And the logic of scandal coverage dictates that this "endemic problem" will quickly be addressed. Controls will be installed at newspapers around the country to prevent the next Jayson Blair from happening. Someone at the Times may also be disciplined or fired; there may even be other reporter-frauds there and at other papers who will be found out (the domino effect is a common phenomenon in scandal reporting: The Enron/WorldCom/Rite Aid progression is a classic example).

There’s sure to be a lot of carnage, and who knows what form it will take exactly. But one thing’s for sure: When it’s over, people will go back to reading newspapers and watching tv with the same total confidence they had before. "Man, I’m sure glad we cleared up that Jayson Blair business, got that fixed," you will soon hear. "Now we can get back to having faith in the system that all but put Al Roker’s gastric stapling on television."

It struck me late in the week that there is something terribly wrong when an overmatched stress case like Jayson Blair can be crucified and called the worst journalist in history, while the person who wrote this month’s horrifying Details cover headline—"Ewan McGregor: Even Jedi Knights Shop at Wal-Mart"—can be considered an honored member of society, a person whom it is safe to leave in the company of children and the elderly.

Jayson Blair screwed up, but the Details guy does his thing intentionally, shamelessly, openly, and as a perfect expression of everything he stands for. Blair tried to hide his act, but no one tries to hide the insane terror alerts and five billion commercials a day, and Howard Fineman, and the Cosmo article that tells a woman that when her boyfriend blinks twice in a row, it means he thinks she looks fat and needs to buy a new pair of $89 Guess jeans.

Which is worse? Isn’t what newspapers and magazines and tv stations do on purpose more important than what they do by mistake?

Volume 16, Issue 21

**When there are armies of cynical, half-bright careerists cranking out fake fallen-hero or sympathy-for-the-victim stories by the metric ton—when a hundred journalists a day need multiple takes to get their tearful salutes to the troops right—how can a lone "A Couple Separated by War While United in Their Fears" possibly stand out? It can’t. But I found myself growing increasingly upset. Not with the Limbaugh types who hinted bluntly that this is what happens when black people are given positions of responsibility.

The implication is clear. After enough of this, we start to instinctively believe that only something that was once a secret can be scandalous. Nothing that’s right in front of our eyes is worth our outrage; there’s no need to fix anything that’s out in the open.

And that’s why AIDS or homeless kids are less important than Monica Lewinsky. **

How can a guy who's so close be so far? As if we haven't been inundated by a hundred jillion Pulitzer-nominee stories about AIDS and homeless kids to go along with the Lewinsky stories...not to mention TWICE that many about how black people eminently deserve positions of responsibility. Why do you think the Lewinsky story played so big, Matt....if not the Somali-hugging sanctimony of those AIDS and po-black-folk stories? Why does the air taste sweetest when church lets out?

There's no dearth of talent out there, but Matt Taibbi is never going to be an honest man, or a great writer, if he doesn't realize his 'rebel-against-the-Empire' stance is as programmed as the headline-writer for Details; only his goes like this:

1) Whites are orderly thus evil; blacks are savage thus wild thus uninhibited thus honest thus creative thus 'free' thus noble. And those giant wangs don't hurt, either.

2) Always question authority otherwise.

Hugh Lincoln

2003-05-20 21:49 | User Profile

Blair proved that most news journalism requires not thought or insight, but only the loosest compliance with a few very basic rules of cliche and tone.

Yep. That's why The Onion is so damn funny.

There are a few other good points in this piece, like the media machinery being built for scandal and little else. But unlike Taibbi, I don't see the Blair story as "just some poor stressed-out dude who made stuff up." See post above. It wasn't an isolated incident. It did reflect an endemic problem --- but not one of "lack of editorial oversight," for f*ck's sake. The endemic problem is the horribly failed attempt to pretend that the jut-lipped wooly heads are people on par with Whites. What's going unnoticed (except here at OD and a few other spots) is how episodes like the Jayson Blair Jungle-Bungle leave White wakes: think of all the screwed White Times reporters (alright, I don't hear any sobbing from you guys, but play along a second), White Times editors, betrayed White readers and so on. I read a little story about some freelancer who got screwed by Blair, sounded like a White woman. Well, there she is, a conscientious journalist, knocked about by this ridiculous run-in with a newsroom baboon, having to face the source down the road and explain why the quotes were taken out of context. That's a big part of the multiracial failure: all the emotional turbulence caused by the in-jamming of races that just don't mix well. Time for a mainstreamer to call for racial separation.

Skippy

2003-05-20 23:14 | User Profile

Re: Matt Taibbi

Taibbi's being a jew explains alot of his quirks. He used to write for [url=http://www.exile.ru]the eXile[/url] with his fellow tribesman Mark Ames. Before that he played professional basketball in Mongolia. No joke.

il ragno

2003-05-21 00:15 | User Profile

Taibbi's being a jew explains alot of his quirks.

He's not Jewish; his background is Lebanese Arab.

Walter Yannis

2003-05-21 08:48 | User Profile

Originally posted by il ragno@May 21 2003, 00:15 ** > Taibbi's being a jew explains alot of his quirks.

He's not Jewish; his background is Lebanese Arab. **

My understanding is that Taibbi's an Arab.

I think that you hit the nail on the head, Il Ragno.

Taibbi's "the eXXile" had some damned fine journalism the past 10 years or so (Taibbi predicted the August 1998 Russian financial meltdown to the day), but it could never seem to shake its canned frat-boy image. He apparently fails to see that the frat-boy gonzo image he cultivates for himself is part and parcel of establishment journalism, just as are his PeeCee "race does not exist" pose.

But he does come close, very close.

He needs to take just one more step - to recognize the reality of race and the fundamentally ethnic nature of our predicament. Especially in regard to the Tribe and its interests, of course. But I think Taibbi is smart enough to know that if he touches that third rail his journalism career would be forever fried.

Come to think of it, the eXile never as far as I can recall addressed forthrightly the obvious issue of the Russian Oligarchy's Tribalist nature - this despite his being nearly a lone voice writing in English about the massive theft of Chubais's "Loans for Shares" program in 1996.

I can only conclude that he knows the score. He's too smart not to see the obvious fact about whose interests are served by all of this. Can't say I blame him for pulling that particular punch, but it also doesn't make him a candidate for journalistic canonization.

Walter

il ragno

2003-05-21 09:13 | User Profile

It's geting damn near impossible for the race-traitor whites to keep painting this guy as a victim of Whitey (see below)....yet the certainty that they will just contort into ethical pretzels to find a way to do just that is like money in the bank.

[color=blue][font=Courier]XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX TUE MAY 20, 2003 19:42:30 ET XXXXX [/font][/color]

NYT REPORTER: I WAS GOING TO KILL MYSELF; SHAMED BLAIR PREPARES 5-PAGE BOOK PROPOSAL

The NEW YORK OBSERVER will report tomorrow that Jayson Blair, the disgraced 27-year-old NEW YORK TIMES reporter, has prepared a five-page book proposal for a memoir that will focus largely how his race and substance abuse played a significant role in his downfall from the TIMES!

[The question is: Did Blair write the treatment?]

Joe Hagan of the Observer has obtained two (2) pages of this five-page proposal. Additionally, Sridhar Pappu of the Observer has conducted the only full-length interview with Mr. Blair yet in record.

NYO's Sridhar Pappu conducted a spirited, two-hour sit-down interview with Jayson Blair and his friend and former Times co-worker, Zuza Glowacka, covering topics such as Mr. Blair's relationships with Metro Desk editor John Landman, executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd; race in the newsroom--and how it both helped and hurt his career; drugs and personal problems; and the anger that motivated the whole episode.

****These are excepts from Joe Hagan’s article on Mr. Blair’s literary agent and the aforementioned proposal: *

David Vigliano, Mr. Blair's literary agent, told the Observer Mr. Blair's proposal would first be shopped as a film treatment, and then offered as a book.

"We'll probably do something in Hollywood first and hone the book proposal over the next few days," explained Mr. Vigliano. "I think we will be getting the proposal out in a week or ten days and expect to make a deal within a week after that."

Jayson Blair wrote about race extensively in the proposal:

“I want to offer my experience as a lesson, for the precipice from which I plunged is one on which many young, ambitious, well-educated and accomplished African Americans and other “minorities” teeter, though most, of course, do manage to pull back from the brink. That precipice overhangs America’s racial divide; and the winds sucking us down into the chasm (cultural isolation, professional mistrust, and the external and internal imperatives to succeed, at all costs, to name a few) can be too strong for the troubled and unprepared—as I was—to withstand.”

The discovery of New York Times reporter Jayson Blair's deception in his coverage of the Lynch family in West Virginia, especially his description of a house from which he wrote that tobacco fields and cattle were visible (they are not), provoked laughter from the disgraced journalist during his first extensive sit-down interview with the New York Observer's media columnist Sridhar Pappu.

"That's my favorite, just because the description was so far off from the reality. And the way they described it in The Times story--someone read a portion of it to me--I couldn't stop laughing."

In the interview, conducted on the morning of May 19 and being prepared for publication in tomorrow's editions of The New York Observer, he sought to dispel the notion that he was 'protected' from censure for inaccurate or fabricated reports by a principle of affirmative action or by a star-system at the Times that held him to a different standard from other reporters.

"Protected, my ass,” he said. “I spent days in the smoking room, days of my life in the smoking room complaining about how I wasn't protected. Protected by whom?”

Mr. Blair called managing editor Gerald Boyd an "antagonist," and claimed he tried to block Mr. Blair's summer 2002 move to the Sports Desk after it had gotten sign-offs from everyone else. Then, he claimed, Mr. Boyd attempted to block his promotion to the National Desk.

"He was the one we were constantly having to prove ourselves to," Mr. Blair said. "I don't particularly like Gerald. To suggest he was my mentor is not a fair characterization. It's an assumption based on race that's silly. And I don't like him! How did Gerald become my mentor?"

"Anyone who tells you that my race didn't play a role in my career at The New York Times is lying to you,” he said. “Both racial preferences and racism played a role. And I would argue that they didn't balance each other out. Racism had much more of an impact."

"Howell and Gerald have certainly had their problems. But using me against them is kind of unfair. Because what I'm a symbol of is what's wrong with The New York Times. And what's been wrong with The New York Times for a long time."

Mr. Blair on the affirmative action debate:

"I don't understand why I am the bumbling affirmative action hire when Stephen Glass is this brilliant whiz kid, when from my perspective, and I know I shouldn't be saying this, I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism. He's so brilliant and yet somehow I'm an affirmative action hire. They're all so smart, but I was sitting right under their nose fooling them. ...If they're all so brilliant and I'm such an affirmative action hire, how come they didn't they catch me?"

He said his actions were part of a pattern of destructive behaviors that stemmed from the stresses of journalism.

"I was either going to kill myself or I was going to kill the journalist persona. So Jayson Blair the human being could live, Jayson Blair the journalist had to die."

Commenting on his client's mental condition, Mr. Vigliano offered this: "I obviously wouldn't be dealing with somebody who was unstable."

Already, **speculation in the New York Post has suggested the possibility of six or seven figure advance for a literary work by Mr. Blair. Those figures, said Mr. Vigliano, “don't seem unreasonable to me. It's a huge, huge story. “I've talked to Jayson and I've seen the richness of this story. It's a very deep and very textured and layered story and he's a gifted writer--and no, those figures don't seem unreasonable at all, by any means.” **

Mr. Hagan also spoke to members of the publishing industry:

Publishers were highly skeptical of a Blair memoir. David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, which published Stephen Glass's novel, said he would not be interested. He said the speed with which Mr. Blair was grabbing for a book deal was troubling to him. “It does appear a bit complicated and unseemly,” said Mr. Rosenthal.

“I am wholly uninterested,” said Jonathan Karp, the vice president and editorial director at Random House, echoing the sentiment of a number of editors contacted by the Observer. “It's a boring story that everybody already knows. I think the public will be completely satiated by the coverage in other newspapers and to revisit it in the form of a book is unlikely.”

Still, he conceded: “Far more boring stories by less interesting people have probably sold over the years.”

Developing...

il ragno

2003-05-21 09:21 | User Profile

There's a six-letter word that sums this guy up nicely. But the OD software won't let me write it.

:afro:

Skippy

2003-05-21 21:26 | User Profile

Hmm, I can't find anything to back up my spurious accusations. I guess Taibbi's only a rag until proven otherwise ;)

Roy Batty

2003-05-21 22:53 | User Profile

Ah, I feel vindicated by Il Ragno's paste up from the Drudge Report. Yes, Il Ragno, we will see contortions worthy of a traveling carnival - which is what this situation is quickly becoming - before the Blair episode leaves center stage. In all too predictable boolie style, he's already blaming THE MAN - blaming RACISM for much of this adventure. Yet, also in predictable boolie fashion, he's letting us know he OUTSMARTED THE MAN as well. As if he believes any actions on his part were truly instrumental in his getting hired by New York's leading Zionist rag. Yes, we understand that Mr. Blair has had a few days to watch the circus, and LEARN the reasons that he should give for his predicament, but why let the truth about certain racial pathologies get in the way?

The Blair tour will be coming your way soon. Trumpeted by a media which will do its level best to blame it on whitey, and festoon it with all the holiday trappings, iike book signing appearances attended by high fiving blacks, with clueless whites shuffling along in line, trying to do their best to look and feel sorry for racism by shelling out $34.95 for Blair's book, autograph, and personal gob of spit from Mr. Blair right in their eyes.

<_<

eric von zipper

2003-05-22 11:08 | User Profile

Blair is obviously demented in a Blanche Dubois, Princess Cosmonopolis (the fading beauty in Sweet Bird of Youth) sorta way. I mean this guy makes Elton John and Judy Garland look downright normal. There is a deranged/demented look in his eyes during his manic phase when he is celebrating his public humiliation and disgrace as some kind of freakin triumph that is probably typical of manic depressives. I can only imagine what he is like when the cycle turns 180 degrees. He has got to be suicidal at that point. Good lookin Polock girlfriend with shi**y taste notwithstanding.

This man is too F'd Up Beyond Recognition to be of any use to the media except to torment Howell Raines. Raines has got to be saying to hisself in the dark of night with his Polock trophy wife sleeping beside him,"what did I, a white man from Alabama with a pure heart, a heart as pure as Moe Dees and Ralph McGill rolled into one, ever do to deserve Jaysen Blair?"

Does anybody actually think that Blair with his coke/scotch/tobacco/cheesedoodle addictions piled on top of his manifest mental/emotional neuroses will ever see a 40th birthday?