Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  Over the next several months, Blair continued to get high-profile assignments from the Times, writing about the families of missing American soldiers and the unfolding sniper story. He also was becoming more entwined with Glowacka, the daughter of a Polish friend of Raines’s Polish wife. Several of the people closest to Blair during this time remarked later that Blair was something of a chimera; seemingly unable to develop a core personality of his own, he instead tried to become like the people around him. In college, while writing about sexual abuse, he suddenly and publicly claimed he himself was a victim. When the space shuttle blew up, he said his father worked at NASA. When Illinois governor George Ryan pardoned all the prisoners on death row in his state, Blair said his uncle was on death row. After September 11, of course, he said he had had a cousin in the Pentagon. And when Howell Raines married a Polish woman, Jayson Blair found a Polish girlfriend.

  That spring, Blair pushed his deceptions to the breaking point. In his 2004 memoir, Burning Down My Masters’ House, Blair would describe himself during this period as being “fully psychotic.” Staggering under the pressure of his national assignments, he stopped traveling for work and instead used his cellphone and laptop to make it seem as if he were jetting around the country. At times, he was writing from inside the paper’s newsroom when he was supposed to be hundreds of miles away.

  Instead of his usual manic self, Blair was outwardly calm, even listless. Roberts says he went out to lunch with Blair in March, two years after Blair had been hired on the Times full-time, to discuss the young reporter’s goals. “He did not seem to have any strong desires,” Roberts says. The national editor met with Blair again in early April 2003. “He seemed even more distracted, and I remember telling other people I thought that was a bit odd, because he had been so ambitious before.”

  To some members of the Times’s newsroom, Blair’s April 26, 2003, front-page story on the family of missing army sergeant Edward Anguiano was seen as further proof of the maturation of a once troubled reporter—it was elegantly written, with fluid transitions and nuanced turns of phrase.*33 Several of Blair’s fellow reporters sent him e-mails praising his work. To more than one, Blair responded with a description of how emotionally draining it was to interview a woman whose son was, in all likelihood, dead.

  RESIGNATION

  After being summoned by Jim Roberts on April 29, Blair went to the Times’s headquarters on Forty-third Street. He brought reporter’s notebooks containing what he said were his notes from Los Fresnos. “I was still wondering, Is it sloppiness? Is it plagiarism?” says Roberts. “But in those first twenty-four hours, even in my wildest imagination I wouldn’t have conceived that he didn’t go to San Antonio.”

  Already, Blair was changing his story. On Monday, he insisted he had never seen Macarena Hernandez’s piece. By Tuesday, he said he had seen a version of it. Actually, Blair said, he’d downloaded it onto his computer and had simply gotten his notes mixed up. Blair told Roberts he was exhausted, and perhaps he had been trying to do too much. As Blair was talking with Jim Roberts, Robert Rivard of the Express-News checked with Hernandez to see if anyone from the Times had gotten in touch with her about her complaint. No one besides Blair himself had. No one had contacted Rivard, either, or anyone else at the Express-News, even just to say they were looking into the situation. After his experience in 1999 with the Times and his paper’s Madalyn Murray O’Hair story, Rivard knew he had to do something.

  “Many people in my newsroom were already on edge because of that situation,” Rivard says. In 1999, the first time Rivard had been on the receiving end of an apparent non-attribution, he had written a letter to Bill Keller, then the Times’s managing editor. “We believe your Houston reporter . . . has made improper use of material without attribution from an article written by a San Antonio Express-News reporter,” Rivard wrote. Looking back at the two pieces, it’s hard to understand why there was so much frustration over this one story. The Times account went out of its way to credit the Express-News’s reporting for serving as the impetus for reopening the investigation into O’Hair’s disappearance. But Rivard, and Express-News reporters, were undoubtedly responding to the accumulated frustration of feeling as if they were nothing more than a bottomless well of story ideas for the country’s national papers. What’s more, the Times story did unquestionably use one quote, without attribution, that had been printed only in the Express-News.

  A week later, Keller wrote back. “Having reported for a couple of regional papers,” he wrote, “I understand the feeling of reporters there that when they have a good story, the bigshot press pays them no respect. Perhaps some such feeling has made you a little thin-skinned in this case. . . . Whatever’s going on, I don’t see that we owe you an editor’s note.”

  Rivard was offended, but he let the issue drop. “Hearst [the corporate owner of the Express-News] doesn’t have me here to pick industry fights with The New York Times,” he says. But this time, Rivard vowed, the outcome would be different: “I wasn’t going to let this end the way the last one ended.” That afternoon, Rivard began composing a formal complaint to Gerald Boyd and Howell Raines. He also decided to go on the record with The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz. “It’s not quite plagiarism,” Rivard told Kurtz, “nor is it as simple as an error of non-attribution. It’s definitely a problem of presenting previously published material without an appropriate acknowledgment.” Around the same time, Rivard got a call from Erik Wemple, the editor of the Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly. Wemple, who had written about the minicontroversies surrounding Blair’s coverage of the D.C.-area sniper case the previous fall, had also been tipped off to the similarities between Blair’s and Hernandez’s stories. When Rivard got off the phone with Wemple, he finished his e-mail to the Times editors and sent it out at 5:00 p.m., eastern standard time.

  Kurtz, meanwhile, had reached Jayson Blair on his cellphone. “The first words out of his mouth were, ‘I really fucked up, man,’ ” says Kurtz. “He was very smooth. He immediately pled guilty to a limited offense—mixing up his notes. He says he can’t be quoted, but explains the situation to me, one reporter to another, saying, ‘Look, I’m not going to defend myself.’ I wasn’t completely buying his explanation.” Kurtz was aware of Blair’s sniper stories because of the small ruckus they caused in the Post’s newsroom, but he hadn’t ever dealt with the reporter before. “The notes excuse, that’s the first refuge of every plagiarist. And besides that, there was more that was similar than just the quotes. It wasn’t adding up.”

  The press queries from other reporters meant there was no longer any way for the Times to deal with the situation quietly. Kurtz and Wemple knew they had a juicy scoop on their hands. Kurtz had already held off for a day, and both reporters rushed to post their pieces online. The Times, Kurtz wrote, was aware of the situation and was “looking into it.” Wemple’s story indicated Blair might have cribbed from at least one other source—it identified a quote Blair attributed to Edward Anguiano’s sister Jennifer (“I’m just not feeling a lot of hope right now”) that had also appeared in an Associated Press dispatch on April 14.

  At 7:03 p.m. on Tuesday, after Kurtz’s and Wemple’s stories were already posted online, Gerald Boyd wrote back to Rivard. “Dear Bob,” Boyd wrote. “Thanks for your letter and the considerate tone it strikes.” Boyd wrote that he remembered Hernandez well from her days at the Times and thought of her with “considerable respect and affection.” He requested some time to resolve the problem and promised he’d be back in touch soon.

  That night, Blair asked for the sympathy and support of his colleagues. He e-mailed reporters on the national desk to complain about how unfair Jim Roberts was being. He talked to one reporter who was under pressure to file a story of his own about ways to protect against confusing previously published clips with your own work. He broke down crying at least once. “I know this doesn’t erase all the good work I’ve done,” Blair said, sobbing. “It doesn’t change who I am as a perso
n.”

  Meanwhile, the paper’s top brass were still scrambling to determine what exactly had happened. The Times, like all newspapers, hates embarrassing corrections, and it hates to correct its corrections even more. When the editors finally printed something about Blair’s Anguiano story, they wanted to make sure it was the final word on the matter. Roberts was growing more suspicious, and that night he called the paper’s photo desk and asked for the unpublished shots from the Anguiano story.

  On Wednesday, April 30, Gerald Boyd met with Jayson Blair for the first time since he had been alerted about the similarities between Blair’s and Hernandez’s stories. Boyd told Blair that he had always been a vocal advocate for the young reporter’s career, and Blair asked for forgiveness. Despite Blair’s efforts over the past few years to paint Boyd as one of his mentors, this was one of only a handful of face-to-face meetings the two men had ever had. Blair also met twice more with Jim Roberts that day. At the first meeting, Roberts made Blair describe the Anguiano household. Using pictures from the Times’s unpublished photo archive as a point of comparison, Roberts was temporarily persuaded the reporter had at least been in Texas. But a couple of hours later, Nick Fox, Blair’s editor on the sniper story, found the AP story that Blair seemed to have plagiarized as well. Roberts exploded. “This is bullshit,” he screamed at him. “I need you to tell me what’s really going on.”

  Finally, at 4:00 p.m., Blair met with Bill Schmidt and members of the paper’s legal staff. Blair brought Lena Williams, a representative of the paper’s Newspaper Guild and a three-decade veteran of the Times, with him to the meeting. “He just seemed nervous,” Williams says. “I’ve learned in thirty years in this culture, no matter how bad the truth is, just give it to them. He knew me. He knew Bill. I said it would be okay.” Blair, Williams thought, would likely face a suspension for plagiarism.*34 “I said, ‘They might not want you traveling all over the country, but that’s not that bad. I wouldn’t doubt if by the 2004 election they didn’t ask you to go back out and do some work.’ ”

  Throughout the meeting, which lasted almost five hours, Jayson Blair continued to work the angles. He apologized—for not working hard enough or not spending enough time with sources. He explained how he had confused his notes and promised nothing like that had ever happened before. But as the meeting progressed, Schmidt—a former national correspondent—realized Blair’s story wasn’t adding up. His supposed flight route didn’t make any sense. Blair said he’d been unable to rent a car from Avis or Hertz, because they were closed when he got to the airport. He said he’d slept in the backseat of the car he did finally rent, and that was why he didn’t have receipts from his hotel. After the meeting, back in his office on the corner of the fourth floor, Schmidt quickly confirmed that Blair was lying. The Avis and Hertz counters at San Antonio International Airport were open twenty-four hours a day; the rental agency Blair said he got a car from was not. Schmidt realized then that the paper would need to fire Jayson Blair.

  But the Times never had the chance. The next morning, Thursday, Blair came in and went straight to Lena Williams. He announced he was going to resign. “He’s so tiny and endearing,” Williams says. “And since I’ve never had children, here was someone I looked on as a son I never had, and he was breaking down.” The previous day, Blair had described a gas station in Los Fresnos that he had visited. Williams still believed that Blair had been in Texas, and she told him she’d call the station. “I said, ‘Sometimes it’s good to be a five-foot-tall black man,’ ” Williams says. “They’d remember him. And that’s when he told me: ‘I don’t want to do this. I’m not going to get through this. Don’t make me do this.’ ” Blair started to sob. “I had a belt around my neck last night and I should have jumped,” he said.

  “I just held him,” Williams says. “I was crying, too. I just held him and said, ‘It’s gonna be all right.’ ”

  Williams went and told Bill Schmidt that Jayson Blair was resigning from the Times. That night, metro columnist Clyde Haberman sent Blair a supportive e-mail. “I said I was an expert on life after death at The New York Times,” says Haberman, who had been banned for life from the paper by A. M. Rosenthal when, as the Columbia University stringer, he had inserted a fake graduation award in a write-up of the 1966 commencement exercises.*35 “I said I could be a shoulder he could lean on. That was before I learned the full extent of his behavior, of course. Then I probably would have thrown him out a window.”

  Elsewhere at the paper, Blair’s editors were realizing they were dealing with something much larger than simple plagiarism. Gerald Boyd got hold of Jim Roberts, who had flown down to Washington to meet with Rick Berke, an editor there, and summoned him back to the office. That afternoon, Roberts and Nick Fox began to check out the stories Blair had written for the paper’s national desk.

  “I got back to the office around four-thirty,” says Roberts. “Nick had already put together stacks of Jayson’s war stuff. I took a few, he took a few, and we started making phone calls.” Roberts reached Reverend Tandy Sloan, the father of a dead soldier whom Blair had supposedly written about from Cleveland. “He remembered the story, remembered disliking it,” says Roberts. “He didn’t remember ever talking to Jayson. It was becoming clear by the minute that all these stories were screwed up.” As Fox and Roberts were going over Blair’s stories, Bill Schmidt and his staff also began to look into Blair’s career. They pulled all the records they could find—expense reports, cell-phone records, personnel files. By the end of the day, Boyd told Roberts to return to his regular work. Raines, who had been at his fishing cabin in Pennsylvania, decided he’d come back into the office the next day, and he and Boyd agreed they needed to assign a team of reporters the task of examining Jayson Blair’s career at the Times. The solution to bad reporting, Howell Raines said, was good reporting.

  Later that day, Jayson Blair sent a letter to both Raines and Boyd in which he apologized for his “lapse in journalistic integrity.”

  This is a time in my life that I have been struggling with recurring personal issues, which have caused me great pain. I am now seeking appropriate counseling. Journalism and The New York Times have been very good to me and I regret what I have done. I am deeply sorry.

  Raines would later say that he accepted Blair’s apology and that there was no need to demonize the young reporter. But as much as Raines and Boyd may have wanted to close an embarrassing chapter in their stewardship of the paper, they couldn’t. The story was far from over.

  —————

  ON FRIDAY, MAY 2, The New York Times ran its first story on the Jayson Blair situation. The piece, which was written by Jacques Steinberg, the Times’s newspaper beat reporter, said that Blair had resigned from the paper. Blair, who refused to speak to Steinberg, gave a brief statement to the Associated Press in which he once again said, “I have been struggling with recurring personal issues.” Immediately, New York’s overactive media watchers became preoccupied by news and gossip about Blair’s misdeeds. That same day, Howell Raines told New York’s Daily News that Blair had “trouble with basics of the craft,” leading many people to wonder why, if that was so, Blair had been sent to cover some of the past year’s highest-profile national news stories. Raines also acknowledged that he had assigned a team of staffers to check the rest of Blair’s stories for mistakes. “We have good reason to believe we’ve published flawed journalism,” Raines said. That weekend, Howard Kurtz devoted a segment of Reliable Sources, his weekly CNN media roundtable, to Blair. On that show, Kurtz raised the race angle, one that would come to dominate the next phase of the story’s coverage. “Look,” Kurtz said, “this was a promising young black reporter. I wonder if a middle-aged hack would have gotten away with fifty mistakes and still be at that job.” Middle-aged white hack was more what he had in mind.

  Kurtz’s comments were notable because they articulated what others were saying privately. Even in better economic times, it was extremely rare for any reporter, white or black, to be
gin his career at The New York Times. Usually, reporters had to spend time proving their mettle on scrappy dailies in smaller markets. Blair had broken in at the top—his first full-time job was at the Times. In those first days after his resignation, Blair’s suspiciously accelerated career path became a focus of many white reporters who didn’t advance as quickly as they would have liked.

  Still, even with all the attention the story got that weekend, the Blair scandal looked as if it would remain more or less contained within the industry’s hyperoxygenated and self-referential media columns. That week, the New York Post ran some small items on Blair peppered with snarky anonymous quotes. Mickey Kaus, the blogger, posted an item connecting Blair’s flameout to affirmative-action programs. The Washington City Paper put together a cover story on the many errors in Blair’s coverage. Slate’s Jack Shafer, who himself had been snookered by a writer who convinced him to run a largely made-up account of something called “monkeyfishing,” wrote about how any editor can be fooled by a reporter determined to perpetrate a fraud. And the Daily News’s Paul Colford filled in his readers on what the Times said it was doing next.

  Over the coming week, The New York Times would demonstrate once again its power to shape the national news agenda. A team of five reporters, three editors, and a handful of researchers were digging into Jayson Blair’s career with an intensity and scrutiny usually reserved for corrupt public officials. Their report would transform the Jayson Blair story into a full-blown national scandal, one that would affect the culture of the paper, as well as that of other newspapers around the country, for years to come.