Black Voices on Jayson Blair:
Lay This at the Feet of White Folks,
Corporate Culture (and Lying Gray Ladies)

Gathered by the Red-Eye Crew
SeeingBlack.com Staff

Talk about Jayson Blair, affirmative action, and race in media! Click here.

Farai Chideya, Founder
www.popandpolitics.com

"…Journalism is like any profession. There are a smattering of people who make us look bad, including the reporter caught stealing gold from Iraq and the two paid $10,000 each by the National Enquirer for lying about Elizabeth Smart's family. Many examples of journalistic misconduct never make it public. One minority reporter I know received a severance package because his boss, who was White, plagiarized his work. The supervisor was not fired, and the incident was not made public.

Now that we've established journalists aren't perfect, let's get to the bigger issue. News organizations—hell, all organizations—like their employees to fit into the culture. That's not bad when there's some flexibility. But too much conformity leads into the trap that Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter describes in her now-classic "Men and Women of the Corporation." The people who advance the quickest in a company tend to look (usually White and male) and act the most like their superiors. Blair wasn't White, but I suspect he was a skillful mimic who used his knowledge of the corporate culture to get by.

Liars like Blair are shapeshifters who spend at least as much time ingratiating themselves with others as they do on their work. Since his days on the college paper, Blair was known as someone who used his charm to get by. (One wonders, given the outrageousness of the stunts he pulled, exactly how much ass-kissing he had to do.)

This type of charming liar possesses qualities that, at least in the short term, are very appealing to editors. No assignment is too difficult, no request off-base. Real reporters get stuck, or at least find out that the story they uncover is different from the one assigned. Liars don't have this problem.

The best reporters today—including the best Black reporters—follow the story, not the assignment. This tends to be problematic for many Black reporters whose editors challenge their independence, particularly on stories of race. Talented reporters of color who see important story suggestions get shot down too often are branded "troublemakers" and leave the business. That's one reason that the biggest diversity challenge news organizations face is not hiring reporters of color, but retaining them.

There are countless reporters of color with proven track records looking for new opportunities. The question is whether outspoken, honest journalists of color are a better fit than con artists like Blair."

From the Black Commentator
www.BlackCommentator.com

"…The New York Times violates truth, every day, with no assistance from African Americans. Jayson Blair is accused of writing stories about people he had not spoken to, and places he had not been. For this, he is crucified, and made a symbol of Black pretensions. The Great White Liar William Safire wonders, "How could this happen at the most rigorously edited newspaper in the world?" Yet Blair's misdeeds, so innocuous that he could commit 36 of them before being caught, pale when compared to the Stalinist crime against reality perpetrated by valued Timesman Adam Nagourney, May 5, in full view of the paper's editors.

Nagourney was entrusted to divine the larger truths that emerged from the televised Democratic primary debate, in South Carolina. Instead, as noted in last week’s issue he disappeared three of the candidates… Al Sharpton, Carole Moseley-Braun and Dennis Kucinich.

…The Times vastly underestimated the October 26 anti-war march in Washington, reporting that turnout was only in the "thousands," far "below expectations."

Actually, between 100,000 (police estimate) and 200,000 (Pacifica's count) people gathered that Saturday on the Mall for a protest of global, historic impact. It took a monsoon of emailed complaints to prompt the Times to issue a corrective story on the following Wednesday, confirming that the huge turnout had served to "Invigorate the Antiwar Movement."

Times Executive Editor Howell Raines neglected to assemble a task force to investigate "how such fraud could have been sustained within the ranks of The New York Times" by reporter Lynette Clemetson, an assassin of history… Such language is reserved for petty revisionists, like Blair.

The Times prints only the news that fits its version of reality, and discards the rest. It now pillories Jayson Blair for doing the same thing, piecemeal.

We think he is a Timesman, after all. "

(Black Commentator might have also added to its fine report all those Judith Miller Times reports about Iraq’s supposed "weapons of mass destruction" that helped build a case for an unjustified war…REC)

Terry M. Neal, Columnist
www.washingtonpost.com

"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 [other busted liars] 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…"

From George E. Curry
Editor of the NNPA News Service
and www.BlackPressUSA.com

"…it was not considered a blemish on the records of White authors when Clifford Irving submitted a fake biography of Howard Hughes or when it was disclosed that Joe McGinniss, author of The Last Brother [Ted Kennedy] had borrowed liberally from Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.

When it was discovered that columnist Mike Barnicle of the Boston Globe and Stephen Glass of the New Republic had engaged in writing stories that contained more fiction than facts, no one indicted all White journalists for their misdeeds or blamed it on White privilege. To be blunt, they were simply thieves.

And so was Blair. He clearly stole numerous passages from other sources without crediting them and, according to a 'New York Times' investigation, he wrote about
scenes, places and events as though he was present when, in fact, he wasn't. What Blair did was a clear violation of all cannons of journalism and, as far as I am concerned, he can climb under that crowded rock with Janet Cooke, Mike Barnicle, Stephen Glass, Joe McGinness, Clifford Irving and their ilk.

Instead of seeing Blair as the liar that he is, some White journalists want to drag race into this slimy picture.

William Safire, the resident conservative columnist for The New York Times, wrote: 'Apparently this 27-year-old was given too many second chances by editors eager for this ambitious Black journalist to succeed.'

Referring to his conservative chums, Safire brings up 'the affirmative action angle.' He writes, 'See what happens, they taunt, when you treat a minority employee with kid gloves, promoting him when he deserves to be fired.'

Safire has it backwards. The only offenders to be treated with kid gloves are White. After Barnicle lost his $250,000-a-year job in Boston, he became a columnist for the New York Daily News and has his own radio program. Glass is about to profit on his misdeeds by coming out with a book (this time, billed as fiction) about his experiences as a liar. Meanwhile, Janet Cook has never had her career revived, and, I suspect, nor will Blair…"

From Courtland Milloy
Columnist, The Washington Post
www.washingtonpost.com

"…Jerry Gray, an editor and mentor, reportedly told Blair that his appearance had become too "sloppy" even for a newsroom—a standard so low that the young man must have looked like a bum.

That such obvious distress could so easily morph into a media feeding frenzy over questions such as "Did he receive preferential treatment because he is Black?" and "Is diversity a good thing?" reflects shortcomings far more pathological than those displayed by Blair.

During a brief telephone conversation with his mother, Frances Blair, I heard a woman at once hurt and relieved, as if a child had been seriously injured but not killed in a terrible accident. "We are all doing just fine," she said with a sigh.

But she did express anger at the vilification of her son—by those who see him as an ungrateful Black who bit the noble White hand that fed him and by those who say that's what you get for giving inferior Blacks a break.

I happen to share her indignation. Then again, I'm from a generation of Black reporters who got into these "mainstream" newsrooms only after White conscience had been soaked in the blood of Martin Luther King Jr. and inflamed in the aftermath of his assassination.

Still, few of us were welcomed with open arms. That Jayson Blair became—more than 30 years after the Kerner Commission indictment of media hiring practices—one of a handful of Black national newspaper correspondents in the United States indicates just how tightly folded those arms remain."

-- June 4, 2003

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