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Jayson Blair Cracked the Code
The Young Plagiarizer Beat the New
York Times at Its Own Game
by
Al Giordano
Dissident Voice
May
19, 2003
The
front page of the Sunday New York Times is a big deal for all journalists
everywhere; we see one of the largest tips of an iceberg ever seen floating in
the murky ocean of Commercial Media:
"Times
Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception," is the
headline, followed by 14, 290 navel-gazing words, including an "Editors'
Note" (registration required) (the "note" doesn't say which
of the editors penned it - the subtle placement of the apostrophe indicates the
plural use of the noun - the Times editors are not sufficiently stand-up guys
and gals that they would sign their names at a moment of crisis) and a long
sidebar documenting glaring falsehoods published by the "newspaper of
record" in the Big Apple.
"There
will be no newsroom search for scapegoats," the newspaper cheesily
announced. The scapegoat has already been found and slain upon the altar of
43rd Street: He is a 27-year-old ex-New York Times reporter, Jayson Blair, who
resigned from his four-year Times career on May Day only after outside media
alerted the Times of some, ahem, obvious problems with his reporting.
Jayson
Blair should now write a manual: "Steal This Newspaper." He gave new
meaning to the newsroom term "phoning it in." He would plagiarize
material from other media, and sometimes claim, including to readers, that he
was in Texas, or Maryland, or Ohio, when, it seems, he was, says the Times now,
somewhere in Brooklyn. Sometimes his apparent invention of facts out of thin
air harmed real people, like when he claimed that law enforcement sources had
fingered the triggerman in the Washington DC sniper case (if that doesn't
unfairly prejudice a defendant to a jury pool, what does?)
The
Times has now characterized Blair with words normally reserved for serial
killers: "a troubled young man veering toward professional
self-destruction," who was both "prolific," and
"pathological." The newspaper now marvels at the "audacity of
the deceptions," and "his savviness and his ingenious ways of
covering his tracks," his "hungry ambition and an unsettling interest
in newsroom gossip," his "sloppy" physical appearance, and his
penchant for "drinking scotch, smoking cigarettes and buying Cheez Doodles
from the vending machines."
"The
person who did this is Jayson Blair," the newspaper quotes its publisher,
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., as saying. "Let's not begin to demonize our
executives — either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say,
the publisher."
Oh,
Mr. Sulzberger, please… Let's…
Nightmare on 43rd Street
Nowhere
in the confessional tome of the Sunday Times is there any mention nor
consideration of the institutional pressures on journalists, particularly young
journalists, at that newspaper or at Commercial Media institutions in general.
Those
institutional pressures, not addressed, will continue. A kid in his twenties
killed the New York Times? Does anybody believe that, kind readers? No. The
Market killed the New York Times, years ago (the recent circulation dip of five
percent in Times sales came prior to the Jayson Blair crisis), and all of the
public hand-wringing going on today at that newspaper won't change a damn thing
about its corrupted Modus Operandi.
To
work at the New York Times a reporter must, first, pee into a bottle both to
prove that he doesn't smoke grass and to simultaneously show his willingness to
suffer the most personal kind of humiliations to get a job there… If he likes
tobacco, he has to go outside in the winter cold to smoke cigarettes; this
predates the new city laws against smokers by years… He has to wear a suit and
tie (or equivalent feminine uniforms if he is a she; indeed, prior to his
downfall, the Times now reports, one of the chief concerns one editor had about
Blair was the "sloppy" way he dressed, and that's being spun,
incredibly, now as an early warning sign of his deviancy)… In other words, he
and she are neutered and spayed before they sign their first byline as
Timesmen. That's how the Times weeds out the free spirits and free thinkers,
for starters.
Being
"prolific" is a requirement at the Times, not an option. "Times
journalists have so far uncovered new problems in at least 36 of the 73
articles Mr. Blair wrote since he started getting national reporting
assignments late last October," the newspaper tells us today.
Let's
do the math: 73 articles in seven months brings an average of about ten a
month, or one article every three days… Or, presuming a five-day workweek, that
would be one article about every two days for the rookie reporter at the mighty
New York Times. Add to that workload the context of the extensive travel
requirements to go out into the North American heartland and do the "real
people" stories that became his trademark, and there was a lot of pressure
on this kid that came from the very same Times that now rattles sabers against
him.
This
heavy rate of reproduction was not new to Blair's job description: The Times
notes that prior to those final 73 stories in a little more than 200 days,
Blair had published, from June 1999 to October 2002, a total of "600"
articles; an average of 15 assignments per 20-workday-month; around 180
articles a year.
A
personal disclosure: I'm a journalism school professor and president of the
Narco News School of Authentic Journalism. My J-School is, obviously, on a much
smaller scale than the 375-odd reporter corps at the New York Times, of course;
I've had just 26 Authentic
Journalism Scholars come into my responsibility so far this year. Most of
them continue collaborating with Narco News Andean Bureau Chief Luis Gómez and
me today. We work daily with young (and more experienced) journalists. The care
and training of young journalists is something that we know from first-hand
experience.
And
what is one of the first and biggest problems that young journalists have when
entering this vocation? In our experience, it is meeting deadline; getting the
story done by the date and hour for which it is assigned.
Any
journalist - young or old - assigned to write 73 stories in seven months - 600
in the prior three years - is being asked, in effect, to produce "junk
food journalism." At institutions like the giant New York Times, sure,
they dress it all up and make it look sufficiently effete and snobbish so that
it has the whiff of expensive uptown champagne rather than cheap Bowery wine;
but the hangover from consuming its product is the same. Cheez Doodles from the
company vending machines seem a natural backdrop for this form of assembly line
journalism: the company, after all, and not Blair, put the the Cheez Doodles
into the sacrosanct cathedral on 43rd Street.
Elitism as Marketing Strategy
Although
it maintains an "elite" image, the sweatshop of the New York Times,
while it may pay better, is not all that distinct from any other corporate
slavery gig: the goal is to produce (in this case, reproduce) a product -
"news" - for sale. That the product is dually packaged to get the
consumer's buck-fifty at the newsstand and the tens of thousands of dollars per
page from the advertising class that constitutes the larger income of the
newspaper further complicates the challenge to the worker: He and she have to
please a more powerful master than the public; he and she have to please only
that part of the public with expendable cash, a minority of citizens in New
York, and in the rest of América. That subgroup - and not the democratic
majority - is the only public that the advertising class wants to reach. Thus,
the affectations of snobbery on 43rd Street are intentional. They are part and
parcel of a marketing strategy. That this imposed style creates incentive for
workers to become bad human beings, of course, will not be analyzed in the
Times' spin-control over the Jayson Blair saga.
There
are rewards, at the New York Times, for all who become cynical in their
corruption of this once grand profession called journalism. It can be found in
how the newspaper allows Timesman James Risen to cover the "intelligence
beat" even as he strikes
a deal with the Central Intelligence Agency to review, prior to publication,
chapters of his book. It was similarly found recently in the work of Judith
Miller - "Miss Suspicious," as she is called in Authentic Journalist
circles in New York - making bizarre
deals with government sources about what she can and can't report in the
Times (MSN Slate's Jack Shafer got two excellent stories out of this one; why not one
in the Times, if Raines means what he says?), while, at least indirectly, accepting money
from the government of Israel, reports our colleague Dan Forbes on the Globalvision
News Network, as she demonizes the Arab world in story after story on her
chemical warfare beat.
This
institutional snobbery could also be seen the April 28th letter by Times
International Business Editor Patrick Lyons: Narco News' former pen pal and
my yawn-inspiring replacement as a regular commenter on letters pages of the
Poynter Institute's increasingly pro-corporate Media News (To paraphrase the
late Ronald Reagan: "I
saved that Left Rail, Mr. Romenesko!"). Lyons' recent letter to the
aforementioned Media News bemoaned the fact that a media criticism job offered
in California only paid $40,000 per year. Lyons was apoplectic at the idea that
a working-class journo might be criticizing the upper castes. He asked, citing
high property costs in that county of California: "What caliber of person
are they going to get to work for $40,000 a year…?" (Is home ownership now
a prerequisite for caliber among journalists? Maybe that was Jayson's problem:
Did he not own a home? That, the sloppy clothes, and the Cheez Doodles, made
him do it?)
The
problem is not just that Timesmen, serially, with very few exceptions, become
snobs, dripping with contempt for the poor and working classes: This quality -
in a word, inhumanity - is expected from them in order to rise up through the
ranks of that newspaper. There is manifold harm to society when those who think
the First Amendment spoke of "paid speech" and not freedom of speech
and press develop a Patrick Lyons-like institutional hatred for all that is
poor or less powerful, or, worse, they echo Lyons' sneering contempt for, and
cowardice of, all that is honest and courageous.
Young
Jason Blair apparently rebelled against this institutional snobbery with what
the Times now claims was his "sloppy" dress. My guess is, working
with young people as I do, that much at the root of this current crisis in
Timesland - the artfulness of Blair's plagiarisms, the sheer creativity he put
into faking his bylines from "the little sister states" outside of
New York - was also sprouted in the fertile soil of rebellion.
Like
Bill Bennett waddling up to a slot machine in Vegas, Blair must felt a grand
thrill each time he pulled the lever - or clicked "send" on his
laptop - and put something over on his bosses. Sure, he probably also had the
sensation that he was doing something wrong, but, kind reader, we are speaking
of youthful rebellion here inside a corrupted institution: That, combined with
the Times' own institutionalized bluster about "ethics" that is so
obviously contrived and false, and the emergence of a Jayson on 43rd Street was
predictable; a natural extension of the tyranny of the Market over that
newspaper and over Commercial Journalism.
Blair Cracked the Code
Jayson
Blair cracked the code. He figured out the fractures in the Times' bureaucratic
vision of "journalism," and he beat the system for four years. One
editor, according to the Times, felt "this reporter was demonstrating
hustle and flair. He had no reason to know that Mr. Blair was demonstrating a
different sort of enterprise." Blair scammed his way out of having to
write obituaries on those who died in the rubble of the World Trade Center on
September 11, 2001, by claiming to his Times keepers that he had a relative who
had been killed there; a claim that later turned out to be false. But: "When
considered over all," the Times now confesses, "Mr. Blair's
correction rate at The Times was within acceptable limits."
Blair
is, to Commercial Journalism, something akin to one of those gambling
professionals who have figured out how to beat the house in Bill Bennett's Las
Vegas: The casinos routinely ban those folks from gambling on their premises;
but nobody in that industry is so arrogant as to say that the skilled gambler
is a "corruption." Rather, the gambling shark is a natural extension of
the industrialization of gambling, just as Jayson Blair is a natural extension
of the industrialization of journalism. Eventually somebody figures out: it's
all format and code, and when format and code govern an industry, there is
always a safecracker out there who figures out how to beat the system.
But
guys like Blair and Bennett - the "moralist" whose penchant for
gambling has recently been exposed - always seem to want to get caught. They
leave paper trails; in Blair's case, he stupidly submitted two-bit expense
checks from Brooklyn restaurants on dates when he had supposedly filed
frontline stories from other locations far away. Indeed, that is one of the
evidences that the Times today trumpets as proof of his deceit. His imperfect
crime aside, I give a grudging admiration for Blair's sheer unmitigated gall -
his chutzpah - to make asses of his bosses again and again, apparently over
four years, while avoiding doing the heavy lifting around the newsroom: Blair
as Slacker King. He may yet figure out how to turn his current disgrace into a
moneymaker.
I'm
not saying, not at all, that what Jayson Blair did was right. I would have
fired him, or forced his resignation, too. Or maybe, just maybe, I would have
found a better, less pressurized, way to utilize his obvious creativity for
truth rather than deceit. If he applied his creativity to breaking the rules,
chances are that there was not, in fact, any real outlet for his undeniable
talent under the rules. Remember: artists, even con artists, are solitary birds
by nature. They only work well in a team when they firmly believe that the
team's mission is worthwhile to them. In choosing my students from so many
applicants, I choose those who are smart and conscientious enough to understand
that their self interests are the same as the democratic interests of society;
the masses.
Their
downfall, regarding the Jayson Blair saga, was the institutionalized
self-importance among Timesmen. Even now, as they attempt to explain it away,
their prior attempts to address Blair's problems involved, according to
Sunday's report: a "sharply worded evaluation" in January 2002, a
"counseling service," a "two-week break," an April 2002
"letter of reprimand" and "another brief leave" followed by
"a tough-love plan" (where do they come up with this shit?) with a
"short leash approach," a "brooking" of "no
nonsense," and also, "lectures about the importance of
accuracy."
What's
clear, in all this psychobabble, is that the Times managers and middle managers
arrogantly presumed that a 27-year-old journalist would take them, um,
seriously.
I
ask the impertinent question: Why should he take these suit-and-tied maniacs
seriously? Why should anyone? What is the mission and organizing principle at
the post-modern corrupted New York Times that would make any bright bulb - and
for all his stupidities, one can't deny that young Jayson was bright - take
those people seriously with their "sharply worded evaluations" and
condescending "tough-love plans"?
Blair's
Times tenure had to be as surreal for him, over four years, as it is for his
former bosses today. They have no moral standing to give stern lectures.
Leadership requires earning the right to lead. The deep pockets to finance a
big paycheck, and the overestimation on the part of Timesmen about how much
spectacular terrain they actually own, at the New York Times, do not suffice
for leadership in journalism.
You
want sacrifice from a young journo? Show him and her that you, too, have
sacrificed and continue doing so: Show him and her the mission, the cause, and
why it matters. If you have no clear mission other than vague disingenuous
rants about "accuracy" (when, after all, accuracy in the commission
of half-truths just deepens the lie), you have no hope to inspire the youth.
Hint: Kids are pretty fucking smart these days. What Jayson Blair lacked - I'll
venture a guess - was authentic inspiration of the sort that would cause him to
believe in the cause. He was smart enough to see through it: there is no
authentic cause at the Times, there only the market, the spin, and the heaps of
ego-serving illusion. At the same time, Blair was under enormous deadline
pressures to reproduce "news," prolifically. And so he mocked them,
artfully and brutally.
Here's
another institutional problem that lurks under these muddy waters:
Let's
look at the kinds of reporting jobs that young Jayson was given that were the
gigs that he reportedly used to deceive: Blair was, no matter what
institutional title is given it in Timespeak, sent to cover the "real
people" beat. Have to interview wounded war veterans or their families?
Oh, how plebian: Howell Raines would rather occupy himself with squashing Tim Golden's
investigations into a Democratic Senator's problems. Send the young black
kid in! He's "hungry," said Raines, according to the Times' public
confession.
And
a quick note on the pigmentation angle at the newspaper that is black and white
and now red-faced all over… The Times plays the "race card" against
Blair in the very same paragraph that it claims that race (Blair is black) is
not a factor. The Times writes:
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.
Huh?
They say he came on board "not because he is black," but as part of a
program used "to help the paper diversify its newsroom." Well, the
way they phrased that one, the Times has just given a field day to the haters
out there.
Here's
what is inherently racist (and censorious) about the concept that
"diversity programs" must mainly recruit young journalists: There are
scores of very skilled journalists who happen to be black or belong to other
discriminated groups who are not young: They are veteran reporters, with years
of experience and seasoning. They are not puppies. They don't need or want to
be housebroken. They don't need a "short-leash" treatment. They have
fought and lived all the right battles, and their bullshit detectors are set on
"high." Want diversity, Howell? Hire them! And while you are at it,
hire some "white trash" veteran journos, too, who don't turn into
effete snobs when they finally get a living wage.
But,
as previously established, the Times wants employees who are ready to sign up
for duty as slaves. And for those old enough to remember the Civil Rights
battles of recent decades, slavery, even white-collar servitude, is not an
option. The Times would have to give veteran black journos real freedom of
speech to tell it like it is, not just about Black America, but especially
about White America. And that kind of frankness about the cracks in American
culture simply is not allowed at the Times, the equal opportunity censor. And
so, instead, the Times recruits inexperienced journos for "diversity"
programs to mold them in its perverse Timesian image in a way that most veteran
journos of any hue who are race and class conscious would never accept.
Anyway,
they sent the "hungry" kid (Howell Raines' adjective for Blair) off
to look for America…
According
to the Times, Jayson Blair faked on-the-scene interviews with wounded marines
in the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Maryland; and he claimed to have been,
also in Maryland, at the family home of a marine overseas, describing "the
red, white, and blue pansies" in the soldier's mother's front yard, notes
the Times, when he had only interviewed the mom via telephone (Blair was such a
skilled artful dodger that the family, "delighted," says the Times,
wrote a letter to the editor, promptly published, that praised the article, and
his editor also regaled him, too, for that story); and Blair reported on an
Ohio church service for a dead U.S. soldier as if he was physically present in
Cleveland when he was, in fact, hundreds of miles away, even deceiving the
Times' own photographer, they now say, who was present, with a creative
cat-and-mouse evasion as to his whereabouts.
Here's
a choice passage from the Times' Sunday confession about a faked journalistic
visit to West Virginia:
Mr. Blair pulled details out of thin air
in his coverage of one of the biggest stories to come from the war, the capture
and rescue of Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch.
In an article on March 27 that carried a
dateline from Palestine, W. Va., Mr. Blair wrote that Private Lynch's father,
Gregory Lynch Sr., "choked up as he stood on his porch here overlooking
the tobacco fields and cattle pastures." The porch overlooks no such
thing.
"We
were joking about the tobacco fields and the cattle," the soldier's sister
later told the Times.
Jayson
Blair's shining accomplishment - we must give him points for this - was that he
figured out, almost flawlessly, the "code" for how the New York Times
writes about a matter it knows little about and, in fact, has only disdain for:
the little people of Middle America, their quaint pansy gardens and tobacco
fields, the Rockwellian images of a world that is much better described by our
2002 Journalist of the Year, Marshall
Mathers, and his graphic uncensored imagery of the pent-up rage and
violence that really is found throughout the trailer parks and shopping malls
of "White America," than it has ever been reported by the New York
Times. Blair delivered to Times editors and readers a format of hokey
"real people" coverage that adhered exactly to the formula the Times,
its advertisers, and its readers, have come to expect: A reassuring illusion,
not the disturbing reality.
It
was precisely due to his gifts of mimicry and illusion that Jayson Blair
survived through 673 stories that he wrote for the New York Times.
Mr.
Sulzberger, is your Nightmare on 43rd Street really Jayson Blair's fault?
A Simulation of Full Disclosure
Last
week, New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines went on the Jim Lehrer News Hour to try and spin
the story his way. "The antidote for bad journalism," waxed Raines,
in full cliché mode, "is to do good journalism about how the bad
journalism got into your paper."
Oh,
really, Mr. Raines? Is that how the New York Times handled the problems brought
to its attention in recent years by Narco News about the unethical behavior by
disgraced ex-Mexican
Bureau Chief Sam Dillon, by the serially inaccurate and unethical rookie Juan Forero who has
reported knowing falsehoods from Venezuela and Colombia, by the blustering
intimidation attempts against smaller online publications by International Business
Editor Patrick Lyons, and others? The New York Times - Raines included -
routinely stonewalls and refuses to answer inquiries by other journalists when
ethics and accuracy problems come to light at the newspaper.
We
must have missed the "good journalism" about how Forero - like Blair,
a rookie who began that same year of 1999 at the Times - reported, in April
2002, that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez had "resigned." Or Forero's non-disclosure that U.S.
Embassy officials babysat his "interviews" with U.S. mercenary pilots
in Colombia; where was the "good journalism" about that breach of the
Times' own Ethics Code? Or many other breaches of the Times' and the readers'
trust reported again
and again and again by this
online newspaper.
Somehow,
we never saw the "good journalism" about how Timesman Sam Dillon's name
ended up in the text of the Banamex lawsuit complaint against us, or the
efforts by former international editor Andy Rosenthal to launder his image when
the mierda hit the fan in Mexico.
The
Times has never listened to its critics. In the Jayson Blair saga, it didn't
even listen to some of its own mid-level managers. Metro editor Jonathan
Landmann went on the record in January 2002, to his superiors, in a written
memo: "There's big trouble," he said, with Blair. Did they listen?
No. By April 2002, according to the Times, Landmann pleaded: "stop Jayson
from writing for the Times." That's pretty clear; no wiggle room there.
But if the Times didn't heed its own in-house warnings, it certainly doesn't
listen to Narco News' good journalism, or anybody else's, when we correct the
NYT's bad journalism.
How
about some "good journalism" about the pressure tactics by Times
International Business Editor Patrick Lyons that preceded the Poynter
Institute's removal of a link to our report on the embarrassing resignation
of Times freelance Venezuelan correspondent Francisco Toro last winter? (To the
small group of insiders who may wonder why I haven't contributed to that
journalism site since January, well, that incident showed that the corporate
coup d'etat is in full glory over there.) Or his own, and the Times', apparent violations
of the newspaper's own Ethics
Code so exhaustively documented and sent to Mr. Raines via e-mail?
Not
to mention the "good journalism" we're all waiting to read about the
adventures and misadventures of Miss Suspicious - Judith Miller - on the
bio-war and Middle Eastern beats or those of "intelligence reporter"
James Risen, and their compromising deals with government agencies in the great
trade-off of silence for access? Send five carnivorous reporters after the true
facts of the Latin American bureaus, of all the foreign desks, and this could
get very interesting very fast.
"Here
at the Times we regard the trust of our readers and our integrity as our most
important asset," Raines told Jim Lehrer. "We want to reassure our
readers of our intentions to use whatever resources it takes to set the record
straight, to tell our readers what was wrongly reported in our paper and how it
got in there."
Of
course, until the competing
press exposed Jayson Blair's false reporting of the Washington DC sniper
case, and a Texas commercial newspaper complained of plagiarism by Blair of its
work, and this problem became a public relations crisis for the Times, the
"newspaper of record" has almost never used "whatever resources
it takes to set the record straight."
To
the contrary, the New York Times and its agents have set out to intimidate and
bully smaller media to shut up about its problems. The punishment is always the
same: Criticize the New York Times, and the "newspaper of record"
will never find any "news fit to print" about your projects unless
you get into some kind of embarrassing trouble. Jayson Blair is today's
scapegoat not because he was dishonest, but, rather, because he did not follow
the institutionalized instructions on precisely how to be dishonest, and, above
all, because he got caught.
In
all this loud display of supposedly "setting the record straight,"
the Times is not even taking the tough questions from the media outlets, like
the Washington Post, from which it stole stories without crediting them. Howard
Kurtz reports in Sunday's Post that Times "spokeswoman Catherine Mathis
said the editors would have no further comment yesterday."
Howell
Raines, in his response to this crisis, picked his media appearances on public
TV and radio programs guaranteed to lob him only softballs, and meanwhile hides
in his bunker from questions by any competing colleagues with gravitas. Raines
"declined repeated requests for an interview with NEWSWEEK," noted
Seth Mnookin in that weekly magazine's online site. In the coming days, the
industry's biggest whores will reveal themselves with disingenuous praise for
the Times for having somehow come clean, just as they did after the Times'
witch hunt against unjustly imprisoned scientist Wen Ho Lee unraveled three
years ago. Get out your scorecard, kind readers: the response by other media
will be as revealing as the Times' own.
"The
NYT needs an ombudsman," I wrote last December 13th in the aforementioned
Poynter Institute website; "too many scribes and editors suffer from an
institutionalized tradition of impunity." Now even the cicadas of
Fallaci-lore will sing that song.
But
it doesn't matter any more, not like some stuck-in-the-past journalists, who
still fantasize about getting jobs at the Times, think:
It
was precisely the art of illusion perfected by Jason Blair in perfect harmony
with the real operating practices at the New York Times that caused the
newspaper's current woes. Meanwhile, the slow class continues to live in fear
and seek the favor of the newspaper that claims, falsely, to be "without
fear or favor."
The
New York Times is a "Newspaper Tiger." Put a magnifying glass to it
under the sun. The paper tiger burns just like any other pulp product. But as
it attempts to place the blame for its troubles on its young ex-employee for
his four years of dishonesty as a Timesman, the Newspaper Tiger is playing…
with matches.
Al Giordano is the editor
of The Narco News Bulletin, an on-line news journal that focuses on the drug
war and Latin America, where this article first appeared (www.narconews.com). Email: narconews@hotmail.com