Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

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  IN THE SPRING OF 2003, Jim Roberts was perhaps one of the happier desk editors at The New York Times. He’d been with the paper since 1987 and had worked his way up the editing ranks, moving from copy editor to deputy national editor to national political editor. While some of the paper’s desk editors disagreed with Howell Raines’s “flood the zone” mentality, Roberts enjoyed—and excelled at—dispatching his correspondents around the country. He agreed with Raines’s philosophy of riding breaking news stories hard. The main source of tension for Roberts at the office was his prickly relationship with metro editor Jon Landman. The two men sat next to each other at every afternoon’s page-one meeting, but they rarely said so much as hello. Blair was one of the reporters they had in common; before joining Roberts’s team on national, Blair had worked under Landman.

  That afternoon after the meeting, Roberts called Jayson Blair on his cellphone. Blair answered. He was supposed to be in Washington, covering the trial of the suspects in the previous fall’s sniper shootings. In fact, unbeknownst to Roberts, Blair was in Brooklyn, shuttling between his apartment and a local diner for infusions of caffeine. Roberts explained that questions had been raised about the Anguiano story and asked Blair if he had read Hernandez’s story in the Express-News. Blair said he hadn’t, and he mumbled out an explanation. Roberts’s heart sank. “His initial response was fairly implausible,” says Roberts. “What he tried to say was that he had just mixed up his notes. But during that period I wanted things to turn out a lot better than they did. I had a real hope that the implausible was still possible.”

  After he hung up with Roberts, Blair called Macarena Hernandez at her desk at the Express-News. “He calls, and he says, ‘I just want you to know I didn’t see your story,’ and I was like, ‘Jayson, come on. Of course you did,’ ” Hernandez says. “Then he says that maybe the quotes were so similar because he got the daughter to translate and she probably just said the same thing. At that moment, I knew. Juanita Anguiano speaks English.”

  Meanwhile, Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post’s hard-charging and high-profile media reporter, had received a tip about the possible scandal from a colleague who had been assigned to follow up Blair’s Saturday story in the Times. The Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia had been dispatched to Los Fresnos to write about the Anguianos and, while reading the clips, had noticed how similar Blair’s and Hernandez’s stories were. Kurtz, after reading the pieces side by side, agreed. He called Howell Raines’s office and left a message for the editor to call him back. He then called Catherine Mathis, the Times’s spokeswoman, who said only that the paper was looking into the issue. Finally, Kurtz called Robert Rivard, who still hadn’t heard back from anyone at the Times. “At that time, he hadn’t decided whether he wanted to make an issue of it,” Kurtz says. “I could have jammed the story in, but it was already late in the day, so I decided to follow up the next day.”

  A couple of hours later, Jim Roberts called Jayson Blair back. Blair, Roberts told him, was being pulled off the sniper case—he’d need to come back to New York to answer some questions. Adam Liptak, the paper’s national legal correspondent, was already on his way down to Washington to cover Tuesday’s sniper hearing. “Even then, I had no idea what we were getting into,” says Roberts.

  JAYSON BLAIR

  Ever since he first took a journalism class in high school, all Jayson Blair had ever wanted to be was a reporter. Blair, who would later present himself as a perennial outsider—“just another black man without a college degree,” he’d joke—grew up in integrated neighborhoods in suburban enclaves. He attended high school in the heart of middle-class Fairfax County, in northern Virginia, where his parents bought a two-story, four-bedroom house in an upscale subdivision for $255,000 in 1990. The Blair home is on a private cul-de-sac in a neighborhood of plush, manicured lawns and tree-lined parks.

  Blair’s father, Thomas, is an inspector general at the Smithsonian, and his mother, Frances, is a Fairfax County schoolteacher. Both were extremely active in their local church while Jayson was growing up. They tutored children and donated money for local scholarships. In a community of involved parents, the Blairs stood out. “They are the finest people I have ever known,” Pamela Latt, Blair’s high school principal, said later in an interview.

  In high school, Blair founded a chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes despite the fact that he never played any sports—at just over five feet tall, he didn’t have the build or natural ability to excel on the playing fields. At times, he appeared deeply religious, quoting Scripture extemporaneously. He also joined the yearbook staff. But it was journalism that excited him most. Blair spent his days hanging out at the third-floor offices of the school’s biweekly student newspaper, the Centreville Sentinel. He loved knowing the secrets and the gossip; he loved trafficking in information, loved seeing his name in print. “He charmed me from the get-go,” Latt said. “He had a very clear focus of what he wanted to do.” In high school, Blair began what would become a lifelong pattern: cozying up to adults while alienating his peers. “I always felt that if he had been our age, we would have been friends,” Latt said. “We would have hung out. A lot of teachers felt that way.”

  While still in high school, Blair interned for the Centreville Times, a local weekly paper. “He just bounced in one day,” remembered Steve Cahill, executive editor of the chain that runs the paper. “He struck me as a kid who wanted to go places.” Cahill describes Blair in language similar to that used by virtually everyone who worked with him over the next decade—he was charismatic and had boundless energy. He had an “electric smile.” But he was also unreliable. Blair disappeared at critical times. He missed deadlines. That was understandable, Cahill figured. After all, Blair was just a high school student. In time, he’d learn to be more responsible.

  Blair was also the index editor of his yearbook. The yearbook index lists only two entries for Blair, even though he is pictured on more than a dozen pages—including the page that features a photo of the yearbook’s staff, for which there was no entry. The two entries that do appear feature two different spellings—he’s identified once as “Jason Blair,” the name he was given at birth, and once as “Jayson Blair,” the spelling he decided to adopt in the eighth grade.

  Toward the end of the book, there was an advertisement that Blair’s parents had purchased. It read:

  Congratulations, Jayson. What a gift you have been to us! We have memories of you as a 4-year old praying for the healing of your great-grandmother, Susie. We have watched you grow as you continued to extend your caring hands out to others. We saw you with a vision to make the Fellowship of Christian Athletes an effective force at Centreville High School. Keep pursuing your dreams of speaking and writing. You are a very special person for whom God has special plans. Love Mom, Dad and Todd.

  Blair seems to have faked his first newspaper story in high school. The September 22, 1993, issue of the Centreville Sentinel, the student paper, ran an article titled “God Attracts 62 Students and 4 Teachers.” At the time, Blair was the news editor of the Sentinel. The article is bylined to Chris Mergerson, who was a columnist for the paper. “Jayson attached [my name] without my knowledge or consent,” Mergerson says today. “I absolutely did not write the article.” If that is indeed true, perhaps the reason Blair—who even then loved seeing his name in print—inserted Mergerson’s name on the story was that Blair is by far the most extensively quoted person in the piece. “It was unbelievably uplifting to see so many students gathered in His name,” Blair is quoted as saying in the piece. The story ends with a paragraph-long, off-the-cuff speech attributed to Blair:

  We are ready for anyone who needs us, just like Jesus says in Revelations 3:20: “Behold! I stand at the door and knock, if anyone opens the door I will come in and eat with Him and him with me.” If you want a translation of that, what we mean is this: God is waiting for each and every one of us. He has already paid the price; He is only waiting for us to ta
ke the gift.

  “I confronted him,” Mergerson says. “He just kind of smirked and went off. It was like, ‘Yeah, I did this. What are you going to do about it?’ ” Later, Blair would alternately say that he didn’t remember high school, that he spent high school manipulating other students to win their approval, and that he never faked a story in high school. In 2004, Blair wrote in an e-mail that it did “not make sense . . . that Chris Mergerson refused an assignment and then his byline was put on a story where he did no reporting.” When asked directly whether or not he had written the piece himself, Blair did not respond.

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  AFTER GRADUATING IN 1994, Blair enrolled at Liberty University, a Baptist school founded by Jerry Falwell. After college, Blair would identify religion as his first “drug of choice,” the first time he tried to hold on to something greater than himself to find his moorings. After a few months at Liberty, however, his attitude toward God changed dramatically, predicated on Blair’s disillusionment with Falwell and his own evolving views on religion and homosexuality. While in high school, Blair had written at least one vitriolic letter to the editor of a local paper condemning gay personal ads. But while at Liberty, he became upset with his church after what he termed the persecution of a minister who was outed as being gay. Furthermore, he found Falwell to be duplicitous and racist. After one semester, he left Liberty, and in the winter of 1995, he transferred to the University of Maryland. “He was easy to pick out in a crowd,” said Chris Callahan, the associate dean of the university’s journalism school, in a 2003 interview. While many students cultivated an air of aloof insouciance, Blair was tiny, puppyish, and eager to please. Callahan was so impressed that he hired Blair to work for him in the Annapolis bureau of the Capital News Service. “He was completely defined by being a newshound. He didn’t know when to turn it off,” Callahan said.

  But while Blair was busy charming the powerful adults on campus—the ones who could arrange for prestigious internships and write glowing recommendations—he was alienating almost everyone he worked with on The Diamondback, the student newspaper he would eventually run from 1996 to 1997. His tenure as editor was marked by strife, allegations of racism, problematic stories, and fantastical tales. “When Jayson was initially hired, people were really upset,” Danielle Newman, who worked as an editor under Blair and succeeded him after he resigned, said in a 2003 interview. “We said we just didn’t think he was qualified.” (Newman now works as a layout editor on the sports desk of The Washington Post.) Blair, according to several people on The Diamondback, responded to his peers’ doubts by intimating to the paper’s board of directors that the staff was filled with backstabbing racists.

  While in college, Blair began exhibiting behavior that he would repeat over the course of his career. When his fellow students complained—about his failure to pay reporters*29 or to complete assignments or about his cribbing copy—he would remind them how well connected he was with the paper’s faculty leadership. When he was accused of incompetence, he charged his colleagues with racism.

  Despite Blair’s later claims that the first time he ever fabricated or plagiarized a story was at The New York Times, there were several stories in The Diamondback that his colleagues identified as problematic. There were concerns about a football game Blair covered—his story was filled with quotes from people another reporter at the game didn’t think existed. Then there was a story in which Blair tried to insert quotes from an Associated Press wire story. “We definitely had our suspicions about his reporting,” said Newman. “But what could we do?” While he was the editor—a post he was appointed to by faculty members—Blair’s spelling and grammar were so poor that at least one reader sent in a complaint. As his tenure progressed, Blair’s behavior became more erratic. Once, when the paper was putting out a spring-break guide, Blair disappeared without handing in a story he was working on. “We kept paging him and paging him,” Newman said. When he finally did come into the office later that week, Blair claimed he had almost died from gas poisoning when his roommate left the burner on. “At the end of the meeting . . . he told me his doctor said he needed to rest,” Newman said. “I told him to go home. After he left, someone leaned over and asked, ‘Do you believe him?’ I said no. She said, ‘Good, neither do I.’ ”

  That night, Newman and others realized the Maryland campus didn’t even have gas stoves. Later, when Newman confronted Blair, he offered to take her to his apartment. “But when I said, ‘Let’s go now,’ he said we had more important things to talk about,” she said. During the argument that followed, Blair suddenly fired one of The Diamondback’s managing editors. Several hours later, Blair resigned from the paper for “personal reasons,” effective a month later.

  Before he left, however, Blair initiated a final scandal. That year, a Maryland student died in his sleep. It turned out the student had died of an undiagnosed heart ailment. Blair, however, was convinced he had been a drug abuser and forced through articles that contained unverified, anonymous rumors about the student’s cocaine habit. “He just kept saying, ‘I’m in charge. I’m writing the story,’ ” Newman said. The Diamondback story became a hugely divisive issue in the university community and was the subject of protests and letter-writing campaigns. “It was terrible. I ended up writing an apology that ran in the paper a month later,” said Newman.

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  THERE’S A GALLOWS-HUMOR SAYING in journalism: When a reporter brings a guaranteed home run of a story in to an editor, the joke is it’s “too good to check.” In 1996, when Jayson Blair began applying for internships on newspapers, he was simply too good to check—a young, ambitious, talented black reporter eager to succeed in an industry that was desperate to diversify its ranks. Blair came with the enthusiastic recommendations of Maryland’s faculty, but even a cursory examination of his work at The Diamondback would have revealed serious problems with his journalism. That probing never took place, and despite Blair’s problems—with reliability, with accuracy, with his colleagues—he landed a series of prestigious internships. While still at Maryland, Blair worked for both The Boston Globe and the Times and freelanced for The Washington Post.

  Blair’s first internship was at the Globe. In the summer of 1996, he worked for the paper’s Washington bureau, and he spent the next summer in Boston on the paper’s metro desk. At the Globe, the twenty-year-old Blair had a reputation for trafficking in nasty gossip, stealing story ideas, and cozying up to superiors so he could get credit for work he didn’t do. “All of us were ambitious,” said one of Blair’s fellow interns. “He was to a dangerous extent.” “He tried to undermine our efforts,” said Jennifer McMenamin, who worked with Blair as a Globe intern and is now a reporter at Baltimore’s Sun. Another intern says Blair frequently tried to eavesdrop while reporters were discussing story ideas and then pass them off as his own. Before the summer was out, Blair’s gossiping became such a problem that Chris Callahan, the school’s dean, felt compelled to talk to him about it. Blair, Callahan says, was spreading information about a colleague’s marital strife; he also seemed preoccupied with staffers’ sexual orientation. “It was like, ‘I have a piece of information and I want people to know,’ ” Callahan said. “It was a wonderful journalistic instinct turned on its head.”

  In his interactions with colleagues, Blair was obsessed with the salacious and trivial. But with superiors, he talked often about his preoccupation with social justice. “I’ve seen some who like to abuse the power they have been entrusted with,” Blair wrote in his 1997 application for an internship at the Times. (At the time, the internship was open only to minority applicants; it has since been opened to everyone.) He wrote that his “kindred spirits are the ones who became journalists because they wanted to help people.” In the summer of 1998, Jayson Blair arrived at the Times. By this point in his young career, he already had a loaded reputation: Globe reporters had warned their friends at the Times to be careful around Blair.

  The Times’s reaction
to Blair was mixed from the beginning. Joyce Purnick, then the metro editor, was never impressed with Blair’s reportorial abilities. She told him the Times was not a place that was able to nurture young reporters. Blair should, she said, go and learn the trade at a smaller, regional paper. Blair paid Purnick lip service in face-to-face conversations, but behind her back, he accused her of racism and noted derisively that she had had to start her career at the New York Post. He also made much of the fact that Purnick was married to Max Frankel, a former executive editor at the Times.

  Nevertheless, when Blair’s internship was over, in August 1998, he was offered an extended stay, as were all three of the other reporting interns in the program, including Macarena Hernandez. (The other two—Edward Wong and Winnie Hu—are still at the Times.) Instead, he returned to Maryland, where, he told Times officials, he would graduate in December 1998. Then, as now, the Times had a woeful record on newsroom diversity, and there was enormous pressure to find and promote African American reporters. The top two editors were both white men, as they had been throughout the Times’s history. Gerald Boyd, then a deputy managing editor, and Dean Baquet, then the paper’s national editor, were the only two African Americans on the paper who seemed to have even a chance at moving up the newsroom’s food chain anytime soon. (According to Arthur Sulzberger, less than 10 percent of the journalists working at the Times are African American.)

  Jayson Blair was a beneficiary of this pressure. He did have some talent to go with his energy and exuberance, although neither his writing skills nor his reporting abilities were exceptional, and there are dozens of genuinely talented, eager reporters trying to fight their way into the Times every day. In June 1999, Blair was invited back to the Times, this time for a probational reporting position. Newsroom administrators later said they had assumed he had graduated from Maryland on schedule, in December 1998. In fact, Blair still had extensive course work outstanding when he returned to the paper.