Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the last word:
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Diversity Had Nothing to Do With Reporter's Deceit Blair's Career Wasn't Fueled By His Race, but by Stories That Were Too Good to Be True
By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 13, 2003; 12:11 PM
The plagiarism and deceit of former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair is an affront to journalism. He disgraced an honorable profession that already suffers a credibility problem. His actions have distressed the great many journalists who go to pains every day to uphold the lofty ideals of their chosen craft. Make no mistake: Blair's editors fell asleep at the switch, allowing him to abuse his authority and responsibility.
But why can't Blair just be one severely troubled guy who did outrageous things? Why are some people using him as an example of the evils of commitment to diversity? Why is it that when white reporters commit similar acts of outrageous fraud, no one in the establishment media launches breathy social commentaries about the continued existence of white privilege and entitlement in the newsroom?
The reaction to the Blair story was predictable. When the story broke, many minority reporters I know said in private conversations among themselves that it would take only a day or two before some people erupted in paroxysms of indignation and anger about the effort to diversify newsrooms.
Those journalists were right. In recent days, the subject of race in the Blair travesty has crept into newspaper columns and talk television.
On CNN's May 4 Reliable Sources program, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, who has otherwise done an exceptional job covering the story, suggested the newspaper's editors looked the other way because Blair was black. "Look, this was a promising young black reporter," he said. "I wonder if a middle-aged hack would have gotten away with 50 mistakes and still be at that job."
On Monday, both New York Times columnist William Safire and Los Angeles Times media critic Tim Rutten cited race as a contributing factor to the Times's tolerance for Blair's errors. In the current issue of Newsweek writer Seth Mnookin accuses the Times of failing to "address an uncomfortable but unavoidable topic that has been broached with some of the paper's top editors during the past week: by favoring Blair, did the Times end up reinforcing some of the worst suspicions about the pitfalls of affirmative action?"
The Blair case evokes memories of Ruth Shalit, the young, white, hotshot reporter who was shooting to journalistic fame and fortune in the early 1990s with her fearless, often scathing stories about people and institutions in Washington.
In 1995, she took on The Washington Post with a 13,000-word opus in The New Republic on the newspaper's diversity efforts. She drew the conclusion that the quality of the newspaper had been compromised by its efforts to hire minority reporters.
However, Post editors documented nearly 40 factual errors – some big, some small – in that one article. Kurtz reported in the Post in September 1995 that twice in the previous year The New Republic had "acknowledged that she used material from other publications without attribution." Some people call that plagiarism. But Shalit said plagiarism implied intent – and she said what she did was just sloppy reporting. Many in the establishment media supported her and kept giving her jobs and high-profile assignments.
While errors are a fact of life in journalism (I had to write a correction just last week), I suspect that none of the black journalists Shalit derided has ever been accused of making 40 factual errors in one article or of plagiarizing twice within a year.
As Shalit's star faded, Stephen Glass's star rose at The New Republic. Glass was another fancy-pants reporter who wowed readers, his bosses and top editors at other major national magazines with some of the most vivid, colorful writing this town had seen in years. Only problem: much of what Glass, who is white, was writing was untrue. Just completely pulled out of his head. Eventually he was fired for faking all or parts of 27 stories.
Glass's deviousness was truly amazing – in some ways even more so than Blair's. Glass recounted in a "60 Minutes" profile on Sunday how he went to extraordinary lengths to cover his tracks, creating Web sites and voice mails for the fictionalized organizations and characters he had created in his stories.
Journalists of all stripes – black and white, men and women – have been accused of fake reporting, but it seems only the transgressions of black journalists evoke the race card.
For instance, when Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith was fired a few years ago after it was discovered she used made-up characters and dialogue, many in the media said the black writer had been coddled at the newspaper because of her race. For Smith's fellow columnist, Eileen McNamara, it wasn't enough to express outrage about Smith's transgressions. McNamara had to play the race card in a column she wrote about it. Yet McNamara expressed no outrage, at least not in her column, a few months later when white, fellow Globe columnist Mike Barnicle, who had been accused previously of fabricating quotes, was caught plagiarizing George Carlin jokes.
Similarly, Raad Cawthon, The Philadelphia Inquirer's Chicago correspondent, resigned in 2000 after being accused of plagiarizing material from the Chicago Tribune. Michael Finkel, a freelance reporter, fictionalized a character in a long article in a New York Times Magazine story last year. Both were white.
By the way, Barnicle was "punished" with a nice job at MSNBC. Shalit is back in journalism. And Glass is back on the road to fame and wealth, with book and movie deals. Meanwhile, Smith and former Post reporter Janet Cooke, an African American who fabricated a Pulitzer Prize-winning story, disappeared into lives of obscurity. The last we heard of Cooke, in news stories a few years ago, she was selling make-up for $6 an hour at a department store in Kalamazoo, Mich., and eating cereal for dinner. She tried to sell her story a few years ago and no one bit. I'm willing to go out on a limb and bet Blair's career trajectory from here follows Cooke's more closely than Glass's.
None of this is meant to say that race is not an issue at all in the Blair case. Many news reports have focused on Blair's arrival at the Times through an "intermediate program." Reports have also touched on the fact that his career was pushed along by Gerald Boyd, who is black and now the managing editor of the paper, and executive editor Howell Raines, who is white.
True as those things may be, viewed in a larger context those facts mean little. First of all, both The New York Times and The Washington Post and other top newspapers hire a small number of young, inexperienced reporters black, white, Asian, Hispanic, whatever – and give them a chance on the belief that they hold promise. My boss here at washingtonpost.com, national and international editor Ryan Thornburg, is a 27-year-old white guy and one of those promising young journalists. The point is young talented folks get shots. Blair just happened to have blown his.
While I'm not familiar enough with The New York Times to speak authoritatively about its hiring practices, I imagine they are not much different than The Post's. And The Post, in fact, has hired more young, white reporters with relatively little experience than black reporters of similar background in recent years. Some of those reporters have walked into highly visible and important positions on the national and foreign desks.
So why did Blair keep getting promotions and prime assignments?
Here's my theory: Freed from the normal constraints of truth and veracity, "journalists" such as Blair, Shalit, Barnicle, Smith and Glass shine above their counterparts. They're promoted ahead of the pack because their stories, sneakily cloaked as journalism, read better than everyone else's stories. In a profession fueled by competition, their careers are propelled along because of, rather than in spite of, their transgressions.
Some people are acting amazed that a reporter as young as Blair would be given such great opportunities – as though this sort of thing never happened with whites. But consider the case of Jodi Kantor, a white 27-year-old, with just four years of journalism experience who was hired away from Slate, a Web magazine, by The New York Times earlier this year to serve as the editor of its prestigious Arts & Leisure section. Kantor may be fabulous and do a remarkable job, but no minority has ever gotten a break like that in the history of American journalism.
To suggest somehow that Blair is unique in being coddled by upper management is pure buffoonery. What about all of the young, aggressive white reporters who are pushed along by overeager white mentors and are clearly not ready for prime time? Happens all the time – at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and every other major publication. Their editors intrinsically trust them. They feel more comfortable talking to them. They understand their worldview. They get handed big stories. They get invited to dinners at the boss's house.
One of the things that was so astonishing to me was that Blair had powerful mentors at the paper at all. In my 14 years as a journalist, I have never heard of a young black reporter with such close ties to upper management. Ever. I have never heard of a black reporter handed such prime assignments with so little experience. Ever. Also, Blair was reportedly an incredible schmoozer, who ingratiated himself with top management in a way that may have swayed his superiors to cut him some slack.
In those ways, Blair was an aberration. As an aberration, he can't be made an example of any larger social problem. Sure, newsrooms have adopted affirmative action policies, but the list of minority reporters who've received the sort of preferential treatment Blair received is a very short one indeed. The list of black journalists with big, important reporting jobs is shorter even.
Perhaps Blair was coddled and promoted not because he was black, but because his editors were enraptured to the point of delusion by this kid who kept getting such fabulous stories. No doubt some editors figured his accuracy problems were a small price to pay for his scoops. And no doubt some editors were happy to have a black reporter for a change that fit the hotshot bill.
The fact that Blair, who crumbled under the pressure of living up to his star billing, went so horribly astray says nothing other than this: He's an embarrassment to himself and journalism. And The New York Times failed horribly by not reining him in sooner.
