Hard News by Seth Mnookin

Author:Seth Mnookin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588364180
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

THE TIMES’S REPORT

On Saturday, May 10, Catherine Mathis was at her weekend home in New Jersey. Mathis, the Times’s relentlessly cheery spokeswoman, openly admits she has “drunk the Kool-Aid” when it comes to The New York Times. Unlike previous Times spokespeople, Mathis doesn’t treat media reporters as if they are an annoyance, and she doesn’t act as though she’s doing favors when she parcels out information.

Like the rest of the media world, Mathis was waiting for the Times’s story on Jayson Blair to hit. At 1:00 p.m. that Saturday, pieces of the Times report began to be posted on the Web. The completed version, posted soon after, clocked in at 7,102 words, or two full pages of the Sunday paper. Two more pages and another 6,439 words were spent correcting errors in Blair’s stories.

“A staff reporter for The New York Times committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering significant news events in recent months,” the main piece began. It went on:

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, 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 lifted material from newspapers and wire services. . . .

Every newspaper, like every bank and every police department, trusts its employees to uphold central principles, and the inquiry found that Mr. Blair repeatedly violated the cardinal tenet of journalism, which is simply truth. . . .

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. . . .

The investigation suggests several reasons Mr. Blair’s deceits went undetected for so long: a failure of communication among senior editors; few complaints from the subjects of his articles; his savviness and his ingenious ways of covering his tracks. Most of all, no one saw his carelessness as a sign that he was capable of systematic fraud.

Mr. Blair was just one of about 375 reporters at The Times; his tenure was brief. But the damage he has done to the newspaper and its employees will not completely fade with next week’s editions, or next month’s, or next year’s.

“It’s a huge black eye,” said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of the newspaper, whose family has owned a controlling interest in The Times for 107 years. “It’s an abrogation of the trust between the newspaper and its readers.”

The piece was an excoriation of the Jayson Blair saga as well as an explanation, but at its heart the Times story was a great yarn. It featured massive fraud, a charismatic con man, and a powerful institution brought to its knees. The piece also would serve as a road map for much of what was to come. It

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