Jayson Blair is, in a word, disgraceful. He is also graceless, and his time in the spotlight has gone on way beyond the 15 minutes it deserved when he was outed for committing the ultimate sin of journalists: fabricating and plagiarizing stories.
Blair is not likely to be a household name to anyone not in journalism or who is not a news junkie, but he’s all over TV promoting his book, Burning Down My Masters’ House: My Life at The New York Times.
This memoir of a 27-year-old black man is not only not very good, but its title implies that he actually had a life while he worked at The Times for a bit more than four years.
His life was as real as that of the girls of Sex and the City, full of swell parties, lunches and dinners at chic restaurants, and poetry readings in Central Park. When he got around to it, he used his access to computer databases and his skill at hiding his whereabouts from his bosses to spend a bit of time “slamming a story into the paper” with great regularity and prominence.
What he did in his self-delusional state had very real consequences. He fabricated stories about families of soldiers lost in Iraq and about the Washington-area sniper suspects.
An abuser of cocaine and alcohol (Johnny Walker Black was his favorite) he claims that his worst journalistic abuses took place while he was clean and sober but suffering from what he says he now knows to have been “undiagnosed mental illness” or manic depression.
“I lied and I lied … and then I lied some more,” he writes. “I lied about where I had been, I lied about where I had found information, I lied about how I wrote the story. And these were no everyday little lies – they were complete fabrications.”
That he’s a creative liar is evident in the lengthy dialogues he recreates in the book. But given what we know about him, why should we believe he got all those quotes right?
The upshot was that The Times was humiliated and forced to take drastic measures to win the trust of not just its newsroom staff, but also the public. Its two top editors were forced to leave.
Blair makes himself the victim, however, alluding to his purported sexual abuse as a kid – and even the impact of slavery – for the demons that plagued him. Yeah. The Devil made him do it.
He shows no sympathy for Howell Raines, the executive editor forced to leave The Times, nor for people at the paper who stuck by him at the end, like Lena Williams, his union rep.
Blair shows no respect for the people of color, including Williams, who put their careers on the line by suing The Times for racial discrimination more than two decades ago, nor for the pioneers who preceded them, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett who had to deal with lynch mobs in the early 20th century.
He’d have you believe that the hell that black journalists went through since New Yorkers founded the first black-oriented newspaper in 1827 was the same as what he experienced during his Johnny Walker Black days of living large while not doing very well in the cutthroat world of corporate America, of which the newsroom of The Times is a prime example.
Not telling us his story, he says, “would be a disservice.” That is part of his delusion. Going away and getting on with his life would be the best service he could perform.
Don’t cry for him, America.
(c) 2004, New York Daily News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services

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