Originally the problems with New York Times reporter Jayson Blair looked they amounted to problems with plagiarism and sloppy reporting. But now it looks like the Times has the worst possible sort of journalistic scandal — a reporter who apparently simply made up facts on a number of stories which helped set the tone for coverage of a major news story.
As this Washington City Paper roundup notes, even though the Times was aware that Blair had a very high error rate (18 percent of his stories were resulting in corrections at one point), the Times nonetheless moved him from his assignment in the sports department to the pool of Times reporters covering the Washington, DC-area sniper case.
Blair quickly became a star there with scoops — he even rubbed the Washington Post’s face in his ability to outscoop them — including one that was widely reported after the arrest of the two sniper suspects. It was Blair’s page 1 story that broke the claim that John Muhammad was in the middle of talking to state and federal investigators about the crime when the U.S. attorney for Maryland ordered Muhammad moved immediately to Baltimore to face federal weapons charges. This was portrayed as a powerplay by the Justice Department that possibly sabotaged efforts to obtain a confession from Muhammad. That story now appears to have been based on Blair creating facts out of thin air (in fact, Muhammad apparently said nothing useful during his interrogation).
The Times, behind Blair’s reporting, was also the newspaper leading the charge with the claim that it was Lee Boyd Malvo rather than Muhammad who pulled the trigger in most of the sniper shootings. Blair likely manufactured quotes in stories to advance this claim. For example, here’s what the City Paper writes about the problems with Blair’s story about the discovery of John Muhammad’s fingerprints at the site of an Oct. 9 sniper killing,
The Post story freaked out the Times, whose reaction story was a masterpiece of cover-your-ass journalism. The very first sentence showed the lengths to which Blair would go to hold on to his triggerman story: “The task force examining the sniper attacks that left 10 dead in the Washington area has uncovered fingerprints placing one defendant, John Muhammad, at the scene of one shooting, but still have little evidence suggesting that he pulled the trigger in any of the killings…” reads the Times’ Jan. 6 account.
To keep his big scoop alive, Blair quoted the star of his sniper coverage—the anonymous law-enforcement official: “This certainly does not give us any inkling of who pulled the trigger in the Meyers shooting.”
Sniper-beat observers have questioned the authenticity of this particular Times quote. Not only does it nakedly support Blair’s contentions, but it also defies the usual sniper vernacular of local police. Investigators in the case generally refer to the locations of the attacks, such as the “Ashland shooting,” or the “Home Depot shooting.” Seldom do they use victims’ names to designate a particular attack.
The City Paper notes that a look at Blair’s tenure as editor-in-chief of the University of Maryland Diamondback would have raised a red flag or two. In one instance, Blair allowed a story to go to print which essentially restated rumors that a man found dead at a fraternity house had died from a cocaine overdose. Two days later the coroner ruled the death was caused by a rare heart condition.
One of the issues raised by critics of the Times is whether affirmative action was involved in keeping Blair on. Would an older white reporter have been assigned to such an important story after as many errors as the young, black Blair was? Howard Kurtz raised this issue point blank on CNN over the weekend.
But the City Paper describes a much more likely scenario — that although he wasn’t a talented journalist, Blair was apparently a world class shmoozer who made up for his lack of reporting skills with social and networking abilities that may have clouded the better judgment of Times reporters and editors. And, of course, once he starts bringing in the major scoops about the sniper case, he’s a star whose critics can be relegated to the dustbin of professional carping.
The Times should be glad that Blair resorted to simply plagiarizing material from other newspapers. Who knows how much longer he might have been able to pull the wool over the eyes of the NYT’s editors and, in turn, the newspaper’s readers. And the bigger question, of course, is how many other Jayson Blair’s there are out there who are fabricating quotes and other facts in order to further their stories and careers.
Source:
Off Target. Erik Wemple and Josh Levin, Washington City Paper, May 9-15, 2003.