Present and former New York Times executives involved in this case declined the opportunity to be interviewed. But back then, management's overall take on Blair was positive. In October of , then 23, Blair was promoted to intermediate reporter, one more step up. Within a year, though, a disturbing pattern began to emerge. People in the news media after I got caught said how could you have not caught this guy?
He had 50 corrections in four years. That's a lot of corrections. Well what they failed to look at is how many stories there were and out of plus stories, 50 corrections is not a high amount. But in November, , a year after he got his intermediate reporting job, a manager's evaluation did in fact raise the issue of inaccuracies in his stories. Around this period, there were also times his bosses couldn't find him, and he wasn't showing up for work. Nonetheless, Blair stayed on the fast track.
At age 24, he was given his biggest promotion yet, this time, to regular staff reporter. That seems so strange? That, yeah, there was some trouble, but he has the potential. The former head of the Associated Press, Louis Boccardi, was on the committee formed by the Times that later investigated the Blair scandal. He says Blair's promotion in was a serious mistake with profound consequences. A spot at which if you had paused and taken everything that was then building into account, you might at least say, well, let's wait a little bit.
And instead they didn't. So in the next several months, Jayson Blair, a tireless worker with bad habits and ambition to spare, was churning out stories. He did them all. When I only made it to Gap across the street to make it look like I had new clothes on.
And there are people who warned me along the way. And said, hey, you're doing great. You're talented. But you really need to slow down. You're going to burn out. Something bad's going to happen. He claims something bad was already happening. He often drank the night away at a bar near the Times offices. And he claims he then began heavy use of illegal drugs:. And crawling on the floor searching for specks of cocaine. It got really, really bad for you in terms of the drug use.
I made horrible choices with drugs and alcohol that cost me, you know, my choices, landed me in a horrible place. On September 11, , the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon shocked the world. At The New York Times, it was the single biggest news event the staff ever faced. Its reporters would win a record number of Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage. But Jayson Blair, at 25 years old, was about to become completely unhinged, and about to unleash a litany of lies and deceptions in a newspaper that had given him the career he said he always wanted.
Some people would say it was disgraceful. You were assigned to help write those very moving portraits of grief… Which really did thumbnail sketches of people who had died in the World Trade Center. You were asked to work on this… Right? Here people are suffering, thousands of people.
And yet you make up a story that your cousin died to get out an assignment. It seems so unconscionable. I emotionally just could not handle it. So Blair's managers, thinking he'd lost a relative, assigned him other stories they thought he could handle. But what his editors didn't know was that Jayson Blair, who had spent years lying and fudging the truth was about to put lies into the pages of the nation's most respected newspaper.
I had interviewed a guy who had been trading on the markets after the September 11 attacks. And he refused to give me his last name. You know, I sort of felt that the story wouldn't make it in without a last name.
And I just came up with one. And I inserted it. And it was a mistake. It was wrong. But his journalistic crime spree was just getting started. A few weeks later, he wrote about a benefit rock concert for the victims of September That article required major corrections, printed over two days:. Did I pull quotes from the Associated Press? Is it all solid, ethical journalism?
I think it's very hard to say that I stand by all of it. Under normal circumstances, a daily newspaper is a hectic, high pressured environment, with reporters having just hours to write their stories, and editors even less time to check them. And every edition of the Times has hundreds of articles. And this was no ordinary time. There was the aftermath of September 11 to contend with, and just a few weeks later the Times was front and center in the anthrax attacks.
Even so, Blair's behavior was attracting attention. Blair soon received a bad evaluation. Right after that, he claims, he sought treatment at a New York drug and alcohol rehab center. Yet, when he returned to work so did his mistakes, enough to prompt one of Blair's editors, Jonathan Landman, to write a now-famous memo. But I can't decide whether, you know, his call at that particular point was the right call. By now, even the second in command at the entire paper, Gerald Boyd, had been told about Blair's problems.
And Boyd confronted him. That led to Blair being kept on a tight leash, with stricter deadlines and careful reviews of everything he wrote. Even under those circumstances, though, he managed to get reassigned from department to department. By the fall of , then 26, Jayson Blair was put on one of the biggest stories of the year, the D. The editor in charge of the sniper coverage had never been informed of Blair's track record.
It was very compartmentalized with not a lot of communications between departments. Is that fair? It's not as though nobody talked to anybody. But there wasn't enough to surface the fact that this was a young man who ought to be watched a lot more closely than he was when he was finally given these high profile assignments.
And soon he started generating high-profile complaints. Federal and state officials said there were mistakes in Blair's sniper articles. And one prosecutor even called a news conference to complain:. By this time, Blair claims, he was in crisis mode, confronting inner demons.
There were periods there where they didn't know where he was, where he was not available when editors wanted him to talk about some work that he had done. By the end of , Blair claims he was holed up much of the time in his apartment in Brooklyn.
Something to get out of the way. But when the war began in Iraq last March, Blair was still getting important assignments. As spring arrived, Blair's lying and fabricating were in full bloom. It's just that no one at the Times knew it yet. His editors, still needing help in the crush of breaking news, sent Blair to cover stories on the home front, from the parents of Jessica Lynch in West Virginia, to the funeral of a soldier in Ohio, to wounded servicemen at Bethesda Medical Center in Maryland.
He never went to cover those stories. But that didn't stop him from writing them. And you were just lying' up a storm, writing these stories, making them up out of whole cloth. But actually sort of really I mean you had a pretty elaborate scam going. I would start collecting whatever I could find. Anything that I could do to cobble it together without traveling. Actually, one second. I'm not even sure about that one. We paused to show Blair the page in his book where he wrote that he had made up the conversation:.
As the deceptions initially started, as corner cutting and then more serious journalistic lapses. And then they began to compound themselves. And I began to get worse and worse. And, you know, play more fast and loose with the truth. Then, at one point, Blair muses on the fact that many of his earliest mistakes were caught only because he reported them — which is the way things are routinely done in a business that is, after all, based largely on trust and trustworthiness. He says:.
His tone presumes anyone would do the same had they realized what he did. But is that really the way it is for most of us? If you had no fear of being caught, would you betray professional ethics? Break a window? Rob a store? Apparently, that mechanism is absent from Blair.
In , Blair was caught plagiarizing the work of other reporters and supplementing his own reporting with fabricated details in dozens of different stories published in the Times.
The daily operations of the Times newsroom became a public spectacle as every major news outlet picked up the story and ran with it. The fact that Blair is African American was emphasized repeatedly, used by some to question affirmative action hiring programs in general. Through the course of the film, we follow Blair himself as he takes us through his version of the events, in which he slowly unraveled in the face of mounting pressures and distractions.
With more and more publications moving to online-only formats and with plagiarism seemingly on the rise, this cautionary tale about the slippery slope of ethical transgressions is more relevant than ever.
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