The N.Y. Times today issued a 7,000-word correction of 37 articles written by 27 year-old Jayson Blair which contained fabricated quotes, lengthy plagiarized passages, and datelines from places Blair never visited.

Mickey Kaus, Howard Kurtz, Andrew Sullivan and others have speculated whether or not affirmative action played a role in both the Times’ hiring of an obviously underqualified reporter and in the subsequent faiulre of its editors to catch his errors. I don’t think there’s any question.

The correction today notes that several times over Blair’s stint with the Times, editors and other reporters questioned his journalism — some even demanded his dimissal. But Raines, a good southern liberal, gave Blair so many mulligans that you can’t help but wonder if he gives the same second, third and fourth chances to other, less “diverse” reporters.

Two damning quotes I think best lay out the position that Blair was a classic AA case.

The first, from Howie Kurtz, regarding Blair’s hiring:

Jonathan Landman, the paper’s metropolitan editor, said Blair was hired as part of an intermediate reporter program in 1999, after a summer internship the year before, and that the paper had been aware of his substandard record.

Does anyone think the New York Times hires white reporters who delivered lackluster internship performances and boast “substandard records?”

The second quote comes from, of all places, NPR, and has since been run by Sullivan, Kaus and the TimesWatch:

Melissa Block, a host of the National Public Radio program â??All Things Considered,â? interviewed Times executive editor Howell Raines on the Blair fiasco–and challenged Raines with a rather incriminating blast from Rainesâ?? past:

â??Mr. Raines, you spoke to a convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in 2001, and you specifically mentioned Jayson Blair as an example of the Times spotting and hiring the best and brightest reporters on their way up. You said, ‘This campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.’ And I wonder now, looking back, if you see this as something of a cautionary tale, that maybe Jayson Blair was given less scrutiny or more of a pass on the corrections to his stories that you had to print because the paper had an interest in cultivating a young, black reporter.â?

Raines’ response completey ducks the question of whether or not the embarassment was the result of relaxed standards for certain skin tones:

â??No, I do not see it as illustrating that point. I see it as illustrating a tragedy for Jayson Blair, that here was a person who under the conditions in which other journalists perform adequately decided to fabricate information and mislead colleagues. And it is–you know, I don’t want to demonize Jayson, but this is a tragedy of failure on his part.â?

As Mickey Kaus points out, note that Raines’ said to the NABJ that the hiring of Blair makes the Times’ better, but more importantly more diverse.

The funny thing is that the biggest pushers for diversity really don’t want a diversity of viewpoints, as a quick scan of the political leanings of the Times’ newsroom or the faculty of most major liberal arts programs will attest. What diversity proponents want are lots of differently-hued faces who all think pretty much the same way.

The Times, I’d say, is still the best newspaper on the planet — and by a pretty wide margin. But it’s telling that even in this obvious occasion of affirmative action gone horribly wrong, Raines can’t admit that this one time, with this one reporter, extra slack-cutting due to skin color was probably a bad idea.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2003 at 11:03 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.