Since the middle of May, Jayson Blair, the 27-year-old alcoholic, drug addict and manic depressive staff reporter fired by the New York Times, has dominated talk radio, cable news channels, op-ed pages and editorial commentary in the American media. You may have seen him on last week’s Newsweek cover puffing away at a cigarette, looking decidedly unrepentant.
The man’s crime? He fabricated scenes, faked interviews and plagiarized material for dozens of news reports he had filed, all the while duping the editors at the most powerful paper in the most powerful city in the most powerful country in the world. (You want to know how fearsome the Times’ adversarial voice is in government circles? Then consider what the syndicated columnist Jonathan Atler had to say in his column recently about the black eye that Blair gave the paper through his shenanigans: “When the New York Times loses power, the US government gains it.”)
At Angles, my Runyonesque watering hole in the raffish neighborhood of Adams Morgan in Washington, which is patronized predominantly by journalists, writers and others who string words together for a living, the Jayson Blair debacle continues to dominate the conversation night after night.
Patrons there have looked at it through every conceivable lens. There was the question of journalistic integrity, or lack thereof in this case, and how Blair debased every sacrosanct canon in the profession, thereby not only corroding the public trust in his paper — the basis for its reputation — but threatening society’s moral equilibrium.
Then there was the question — and in this PC age, let’s tread carefully here — of affirmative action, often defined as “race-based remedies” to inequality in the workplace and in higher education. Most of my colleagues at Angles (and in the interest of full disclosure, I have to say they are all lilywhite) were of the opinion, expressed sotto voce, that were Blair not black, he would not have been promoted to the position he had at age 27, and his editors would not have cut him so much slack. Don’t blame affirmative action, a commendable policy whose rationale is to broaden the racial spoils system in the country, retorted another friend, nor should one, in the end, blame even Blair himself. The blame should squarely be put on the editors, and the editors alone — professionals one and all — for letting themselves be fooled by the smarmy charm of a young, albeit brazen, reporter. Their job was to spot fabrications and plagiarisms in writing dedicated to fact, and they failed in it.
And so it goes on, at Angles, night in, night out, as we recall similar journalistic scandals over the years, from Janet Cook at the Washington Post (1980) to Stephen Glass at the New Republic (1998) and from Patricia Smith to Mike Barnicle, both at the Boston Globe (1997), all of whom had disgraced their papers and their craft — and all were disgraced in turn, never again allowed to insinuate themselves into a profession whose product has been defined as “the rough draft of history.”
Guess what? I have kept out of this heated debate at Angles. Truth be told, the folks there wouldn’t relate to my take on the issue, which is this: I pray for the day when I would get to read about a similar scandal in the Arab press, about how some prominent Arab newspaper had fired one of its staff reporters for some act of journalistic malfeasance because it considers the craft of disseminating news and commentary a public trust, so serious an exercise as to hold a reporter’s feet to the fire for screwing up.
If the press in the Arab world is to be taken seriously, by Arabs and by outsiders, it cannot have standards less rigorous than those that apply to its counterpart in the US. If I’m not mistaken, the Arab media tolerates not only fabricators and plagiarists, but also fantasists who tout conspiracy theories, including ones, ironically, about how newspapers in America are “owned and controlled by Jews.”
Meanwhile — and hold on to your hats — Jayson Blair, with a literary agent in tow, is seen in town shopping around for book and firm rights for his story. Damn the man.
Arab News Opinion 2 June 2003
