The Times Bomb
The executive editor of the New York Times, Howell Raines, was walking down the street in Times Square, preparing for one of the most difficult meetings of his life. It was Wednesday, May 14, and Raines, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman and publisher of the Times, and Gerald Boyd, the managing editor, grinned gamely for the cameras as they made the short trip from the Times ’s West 43d Street newsroom to a nearby movie theater. For Raines, it was a session that could determine the course of the rest of his career, a bitter and angry showdown with a staff that had been roiled by the revelations that Jayson Blair, a 27-year-old reporter, lifted quotes, made up scenes and faked interviews – all in the pages of the most powerful newspaper in the world. As the Times meeting was unfolding, Jayson Blair was holed up in an apartment in Manhattan, talking to his lawyer and his literary agent. The week before, friends say, Blair had checked himself out of Silver Hill, a in-patient hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he had been receiving treatment for a history of alcoholism, cocaine abuse and maniac depression, NEWSWEEK has learned. Blair says he’s been clean and sober for more than a year, but even he knew that his behavior had been blindingly self-destructive. Practically everyone who came in contact with him describes Blair in similar language: charismatic, ambitious – and unreliable. Throughout Blair’s journalism stints in high school and college, former co-workers retell a history of missed deadlines, lifted quotes, unexplained disappearances and fantastical excuses. These only persisted at the Times, where he arrived in the summer of 1998. Almost immediately, multiple sources at the paper say, he began to brag about his close relationship with Gerald Boyd, who at the time was one of the paper’s deputy managing editors. The mentoring relationship made sense – one of Boyd’s responsibilities was to work with young reporters, and Boyd, like Blair, is Afro-American. Boyd, for his part, says he’s never had any particularly close relationship with Blair. “I’ve had less dealings with him than I’ve had with most reporters,” Boyd told NEWSWEEK. Despite the reservations of many people at the paper, Blair was promoted to staff reporter in 2001 – a promotion that occurred, according to the Times ’s own account of the Blair scandal, “with the consensus of a recruiting committee of roughly half a dozen people headed by Gerald Boyd, then a deputy managing editor, and the approval of Mr Lelyveld,” the paper’s executive editor at the time. But in the fall, a half year after taking a leave in the paper’s employee-assistance program and with a personnel file full of warnings and reprimands, the Times top editors tapped Blair to help cover the Washington D.C. sniper case. In the Times ’s own account, Boyd and Raines (who denied repeated requests for an interview) made the decision to include Blair on the sniper team. Six days after landing in Maryland, Blair scored a front-page story that included false information that he attributed to unnamed sources. Prosecutors hit the roof. But Blair was never asked to produce his multiple anonymous sources, and there was no discussion of pulling him off the case. Over the next several months Blair continued to get high-profile assignments for the Times, writing about the families of missing American soldiers and staying on the sniper story. This spring Blair pushed his deceptions to the breaking point. Staggering under the pressure of his national assignments, he stopped traveling on assignments, using his cell phone and laptop to make it seem as if he was jetting around the country. At times he was writing from inside the paper’s newsroom. In April he plagiarized a story from San Antonio Express-News. When confronted about the charge, Blair resigned rather than produce receipts proving he had, in fact, traveled to Texas. For the week following Blair’s resignation, the scandal at the Times was a kind of low hum in the nation’s newsroom. But the Times ’s four-page report, printed on May11, turned that hum into an all-consuming roar. Blair, meanwhile, knows his career in journalism is over. But he is still working the angles. Blair’s signed up with David Vigliano, a literary agent, and is in the talks for book, movie and television deals. Ted Faraone, a PR agent who had worked with Blair on stories at the Times, told NEWSWEEK he called the reporter after reading about his career suicide. “He called me back Wednesday,” the day of the Times ’s town-hall meeting, Faraone said. “He sounded in pretty good spirits, considering everything.” Then Faraone added another thought. “If one thing can be said about this from a literary standpoint, the American people tend to be very forgiving if you come clean. They’ll watch the TV movie and pay $9.50 to see the feature film. It’s a strange commentary on celebrity in the 21st-century America, but in a way that’s how we rehabilitate people after they’ve fallen.” (From ‘Newsweek’, abridged)
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