Sullivan has the same questions I have. Raines is not going to make this go away until they are answered. I think, upon consideration, that Raines performance on PBS Friday could only be described as arrogant and defensive.
"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.
- 3:50:53 PM
THE BLAIR DISASTER: 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 happenedhttp://www.andrewsullivan.com/ |
