Posted 6:53 AM by Peter Fallow
THE FRIDAY FIVE: OK, here goes:

1. What do you most want to be remembered for?
Being a good person. (I'm trying to be a good person, anyway.)

2. What quotation best fits your outlook on life?
"Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about."
Oscar Wilde

3. What single achievement are you most proud of in the past year?
Lowering my cholesterol more than 70 points. The only "drug" I've used is niacin.

4. What about the past ten years?
Hmm. I guess securing my current job. That, and finally meeting a woman whom I love, and who loves me.

5. If you were asked to give a child a single piece of advice to guide them through life, what would you say?
Strive to be a good and kind person.

Posted 6:41 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE 'TIMES' BASHING: Jonah Goldberg dissects a New York Times article on "Hipublicans," young campus conservatives who (gasp) look like all the other kids at college! As usual, it's funny and smart, often in the same sentence. Check it out.

Posted 6:26 AM by Peter Fallow
IT'S MILLER TIME: Slate's Jack Shafer continues to excoriate the New York Times' Judith Miller for her coverage of intelligence reports on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now, I'm a little concerned that we haven't found these weapons yet (I think we will eventually) but I don't think this is cause to be overly hard on Miller. Let me explain.

Shafer makes a big deal of the fact that Miller and the Times unquestioningly reported the findings of intelligence sources, perhaps inadvertently allowing themselves to be "spun" by sinister forces who wanted a war in Iraq at any cost. Presumably, Shafer and other critics would want Miller to use some other sources that might cast reasonable doubt on what's being fed to U.S. intelligence agencies. But the key question is, what would these alternative sources be? Intelligence agencies in other countries? Some apparatchik from Saddam Hussein's regime? Scott Ritter? An "independent" body such as the U.N.? International A.N.S.W.E.R.?

And therein lies the rub. How much can you trust your sources for a blockbuster story when they're basically the only ones you have? And in our current hypermedia environment, would you really expect a newspaper to hold such a story until some alternative sources could be found?

Posted 7:47 AM by Peter Fallow
DID YOU GET THE MEMO? Check this out. It's a memo from Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll to his staffers regarding a blatantly biased story on abortion. (Link via Hoystory.)

Posted 7:04 AM by Peter Fallow
AL-JAZEERA FOR SALE: The Weekly Standard has a potential blockbuster of a story: Evidence that Saddam Hussein paid off some Al-Jazeera staffers to ensure positive media coverage.

Nothing on Romenesko yet, though, so the story officially does not exist.

Posted 6:51 AM by Peter Fallow
BRAGG RESIGNS: Rick Bragg, the New York Times reporter who was suspended for relying too heavily on stringers, has resigned. After Bragg made comments to the Washington Post claiming that what he did was not unusual and that he was being singled out for punishment, many of his colleagues vented their spleens Wednesday on Romenesko's Letters page (and also here), denying that the use of uncredited stringers to do the basic reporting on many stories in the Times was widespread. However, the Washington Post story cited above indicates that the practice may, indeed, be fairly common:

Lisa Suhay, a Times freelance writer who says her work on one article was badly distorted by Blair, maintained that Bragg "is being punished for what I, as a freelancer, have seen in four years as common practice.

"I have covered anthrax, plane crashes, roller-coaster disasters, interviewed the family of a local POW -- all high-profile stories, with no credit. . . . It was simply understood that I got paid to be invisible, a nonentity, entrusted to go to market to get the choicest bits for the dish being prepared."

Milton Allimadi, a Times metro stringer for two years in the mid-1990s, said he routinely filed crime stories that were "barely touched" by editors and reporters but never got a byline. "I often wondered how readers I had interviewed must have been surprised the next day. While interviewing them I identified myself as Milton Allimadi, and the next day the byline would be totally different," he said.

It certainly seems that Bragg took the reliance on stringers to ludicrous lengths. But I think the blame for this fiasco rests with the Times' stringer policy, which is pretty damn unclear. The paper needs to tell its big-shot reporters to swallow their egos and allow people who do the legwork for a story to get some credit, either in the byline or in a note at the bottom of the story.

Posted 6:39 AM by Peter Fallow
SEGWAY COVERAGE: The Washington City Paper has an interesting story on how journalists have hyped the Segway scooter. Apparently, few have seriously considered the implications of sidewalks full of people moving at up to 12 mph. I liked this bit:

If Segway driving moves out of the realm of the theoretical and becomes part of the traffic flow, reporters will adopt a more skeptical tone. But a few may have to get run over first.

Personally, this Segway thing seems like something for uber-geeks only. I don't think it will ever catch on with the car-driving, foot-walking public.

Posted 7:34 AM by Peter Fallow
RACE & THE MEDIA: Using the Jayson Blair affair as a springboard, Reason's Cathy Young calls for a reasoned debate about race in America:

Racism has a terrible history in American culture, and few would deny that it still exists in many strata of society. As a result, there is a widespread attitude that to challenge or dismiss specific claims of racism is insensitive if not downright dangerous. Even blacks who stray from the party line are often accused of either unwittingly playing into the hands of racists or consciously trying to please their white "masters." Issues such as affirmative action have many complicated layers, and both sides have valid arguments. But we should be able to discuss these issues without being browbeaten by charges of bigotry. The best way to overcome racial antagonism is to lay all the cards on the table.

Amen to that.

Posted 7:23 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE 'TIMES' BASHING: The hits just keep on coming. This time, City Journal writer Sol Stern dissects a piece celebrating the Black Panthers. Ironically, Stern wrote one of the first hagiographies of the Panthers for the Times in 1967.

Posted 6:58 AM by Peter Fallow
HOW TO WRITE A 'NEW YORK TIMES' FEATURE STORY: James Lileks tells us. And he also addresses the Rick Bragg fiasco:

I will say this: when I was a feature writer, everything I wrote about, I saw. The idea that someone else would provide me with raw material to shape into a story from my desk would have seemed completely wrong, and would have made me feel like a fraud when anyone said they liked the piece. It’s not the writing alone that makes a good piece, it’s what you noticed, what your eye chose and your mind remembered. It’s all the stuff you leave out that makes your piece work, as much as the stuff you put in.

Yes, you can take some stringer’s notes and compose a story, but the difference between that an a piece you wrote from your own research is the difference between a Penthouse Forum letter and your recollection of your wedding night.

True.

Posted 8:28 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON DIVERSITY: Check out this excellent post on newsroom diversity by John Rosenberg at Discriminations. He raises some important questions:

And this, finally, brings us back to the Blair Affair, and a larger question: What is the relevance of ASNE's (American Society of Newspaper Editors) aggressive pro-"diversity" stance to the way its members write about "diversity"? ASNE's web site, for example, calls for "increasing minority scholarships and internships," even though one Court of Appeals has held such race-specific scholarships unconstitutional at state institutions (Podberesky v. Kirwan, 38 F.3d 147 [4th Cir. 1994], cert. denied, 115 S. Ct. 2001 [1995]).

Does membership in an organization energetically espousing such views, and impressing them upon its members, compromise the ability of the press to cover the controversy over "diversity" -- not only in its own newsrooms but also at other organizations? Does it raise the famous issue of "the appearance" of a conflict of interest, or at least of a lack of objectivity?

The short answer is of course it compromises the media's ability to cover diversity-related issues. I don't have time to go into it today, but check out Jim Sleeper's Liberal Racism for more, or William McGowan's Coloring The News.

Posted 8:19 AM by Peter Fallow
HEY MACARENA! Macarena Hernandez, the young reporter who had her work ripped off by Jayson Blair, leading to his downfall, writes a column for the Los Angeles Times that reveals how difficult it will be to end the grip of "diversity uber alles" at America's newspapers. She takes the predictable tack and blames Blair, not diversity policies, for Blair's lies -- something everyone else who has commented on this story has done, too. (The blame comes in the coddling Blair received from New York Times bigwigs, who ignored all the warning signs and promoted Blair, even when one of his editors warned that he had to be stopped.) Hernandez's piece reflects the confusion brought about by the heavy-handed quest for diversity. Describing her time as an intern in a race-conscious program:

I worked hard to prove myself, because in the end, even if they showed me the door, I didn't want anyone to be able to say that the only reason I had filed stories from one of the most important newsrooms in the world was because I was brown.

In the end, Hernandez was offered a job by the Times. Now, I'll assume she did some outstanding work, but therein lies the problem with programs that single out minorities for advancement. It's the lingering question: Was she offered the job because she was brown? The answer is yes, of course, EVEN IF SHE WAS THE BEST JOURNALIST IN AMERICA. That's the downside of affirmative action that its supporters refuse to talk about. It's a stigma in the same league as being "the son of the boss." No matter how hard you work, no matter how well you do, everyone will assume you got your job because you are related to the boss. Now, is that racism as we've typically understood it, or a very human reaction to something that enshrines unfairness into a policy that can't be questioned?

If the New York Times was sincerely committed to diversity, Blair's editors would have chopped off his fingers at the first sign of trouble instead of helping him polish his claws. If the guy is too lazy and drunk to take his job seriously, he doesn't deserve to work there.

It has been my experience that the sincerest expression of a commitment to "diversity" in a newsroom is exactly the opposite of what Hernandez describes. It has invariably involved doing whatever is necessary to ensure that a minority journalist succeeds -- regardless of the talent level of the minority journalist. Good minority journalists can literally write their own ticket -- or have it written for them. (I've described on this blog how two black former co-workers of mine -- one eminently qualified, one shockingly incompetent -- were given jobs by much larger newspapers without having to even apply. The big papers called them -- not the other way around -- because diversity is one of the "core principles" of the modern American newsroom, and it must be achieved by any means necessary.)

Editors who hire and promote reporters solely because of the color of their skin or their surnames are admitting that their idea of diversity is only skin-deep. Still, newsrooms, which remain predominantly white, do have a social responsibility to reflect the communities they cover. If newspapers kill programs like the one Jayson and I went through because of what he did, they will increase the damage he inflicted on our profession. They will have allowed a thief to steal from the poor.

Well, the current fashionable "idea of diversity" IS only skin-deep. Newsroom managers receive bonuses based on the number of brown faces they can put behind desks. You may have indeed busted your ass at the Times, but when everyone in the newsroom knows you were offered your job because of a racial preference, you will have to work harder to prove you belong. It has tainted all of your achievements. If there were no such preferences, that kind of resentment might be greatly lessened.

It's not that there isn't racism in the newsrooms of America. There is. But that wasn't what brought Jayson Blair down. And what he did has reinforced racist views, prompting some to say, "look what happens when we let them in."

Unfortunately, there will be people who say "look what happens when we let them in." Racists are, indeed, everywhere (though there are far fewer in newsrooms than probably any other work environment in America). But it seems to me that the kind of hard-edged commitment to diversity that allowed an incompetent liar like Jayson Blair to flourish is providing the stigma here, not the views of the few journalists who might be racists.

Posted 7:22 AM by Peter Fallow
FACT CHECKERS EXPLAINED: Slate has a very useful story explaining why daily newspapers don't employ fact checkers. (Hint: There's no time to do it.) Check it out.

Posted 7:08 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE 'TIMES' TROUBLES: I'm a little late catching up to the story of Rick Bragg, the New York Times reporter who has been disciplined for not giving a stringer credit for doing grunt-work reporting. Apparently, it's a common occurrence at the Times and other papers, though I have to say I've never heard of it until now. It's always been my experience that stringers or contributors get partial credit, either in the byline or in a note at the end of the story.

Anyway, back to Bragg. He tells the Washington Post that he feels he's being singled out as a sacrificial lamb in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair affair:

But now what he calls a "poisonous atmosphere" has descended on the Times -- one that prompted the paper to suspend Bragg for two weeks for practices he considers utterly routine -- and the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter says he will quit in the next few weeks.

"Obviously, I'm taking a bullet here," he said of the suspension imposed last week. "Anyone with half a brain can see that." But, he said, "I'm too mad to whine about it."

So Bragg is a make-up call for Blair, to prove that white guys can be fuck-ups, too.This could be the work of Raines. But perhaps the "poisonous atmosphere" Bragg describes has been brought on by black staffers who are mau-mauing for a prominent white head on a platter. (There's certainly been an angry subtext of "what about all the white screw-ups" in the columns written by black journalists in the wake of the Blair affair, as if we'd all be ignoring what Blair did if he were white.) I guess we'll never know.

Posted 2:21 PM by Peter Fallow
HAVE A GREAT MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND! I'll drink a few for you and check back in next week.

Posted 7:59 AM by Peter Fallow
THE FRIDAY FIVE: Here's something new I'm going to try each week. You can, too. Follow this link. Here goes:

1. What brand of toothpaste do you use?
Mentadent Advanced Care.

2. What brand of toilet paper do you prefer?
Charmin. The softer, the better.

3. What brand(s) of shoes do you wear?
At work, whatever kind of generic dress or dress casual shoe I can afford. At home, Adidas or Nike. (Currently Nike. They were on sale.)

4. What brand of soda do you drink?
I'm not a big soda drinker, but I like all kinds. Sprite, Mountain Dew and Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi.

5. What brand of gum do you chew?
Whatever anyone gives me. I rarely buy gum.

Posted 7:39 AM by Peter Fallow
McGOWAN ON THE MEDIA William McGowan, author of the excellent Coloring the News, weighs in on the media's recent woes and examines a little-observed phenomenon: "high-end media nepotism." Check it out.

And for more McGowan, here's an interview with him about Jayson Blair at Times Watch. Note this comment, with which I generally agree:

"I don’t think the Blair case should impose a stigma on all minority journalists. It shouldn’t invalidate all diversity efforts either, especially efforts aimed at casting a wide net, opening doors to talented people, all the while maintaining standards as you are doing so. But I do think you’d be journalistically at fault if you didn’t acknowledge where diversity and race was a factor in the Blair case and the Times institutional response to it."

Amen to that.

Posted 7:24 AM by Peter Fallow
HEDGES UPDATE: The excellent TimesWatch has more on New York Times reporter Chris Hedges' diatribe at Rockford College's graduation ceremony, including examples of his "objectivity" regarding Israel and U.S. foreign policy. And, if you don't want to listen to Hedges' screed, you can read a transcript here.

And here's James Lileks on Hedges' speech:

Is it wrong to deliver an antiwar commencement address? Of course not. You could argue that it would be a dereliction of your duties not to bring the outside world into your comments, since that’s the place to which the grads are headed. But such a speech needs to persuade. It needs to draw the audience close, make eye contact. Crack a joke, wax colloquial, opine a bit, then bring it all back to the grads. Pat them on the back, remind them that the process of learning has just begun, warn them against cant of any sort, and give them a closing that wraps this extraordinary day up in one sweet smart line they can take with them for the hard years to come.

What did he do? He cracked the mike, and said I have come to talk about war, and empire. You could just hear the shoulders sag: oh man. It’s Mr. Big Wet Pillow fingering his Vietnamese worry-beads. As if we haven’t heard this for the last four years.

That's perfect.

Posted 7:12 AM by Peter Fallow
ON CONDITION OF ANONYMITY: Editor & Publisher has an editorial up on the Jayson Blair fiasco. The first couple of grafs are a lame-ass attempt to minimize the degree to which an overzealous quest for "diversity" played a role in this whole mess. But the nut of the opinion piece is a solid critique of the use and abuse of anonymous sources:

One inescapable conclusion from this scandal is that the Times has developed an addictive tolerance for anonymous sources, the crack cocaine of journalism. The Times could not go cold turkey even in its extraordinary Mother's Day cataloging of Blair's journalistic sins, an occasion that cried out for 100% on-the-record reporting. For no apparent reason other than habit, an entirely innocuous e-mail message was attributed to "one fellow reporter."

It is virtually impossible to read an important front-page story in the Times and not stumble across anonymous sources, either used directly to supply what we assume is factual information, or indirectly in those ever popular "context-setting" sentences. Here's an example of both types from today's paper:

Mr. Rumsfeld's initial proposal came at a time when questions were being raised both inside and out the government over the quality of the intelligence concerning links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. One intelligence official said Mr. Rumsfeld had become irritated by disagreements within the intelligence community over the possible links between Iraq and the Qaeda network. Before the war, some Pentagon officials expressed frustration over what they perceived to be excessive caution on the part of C.I.A. analysts who found scant Qaeda-Iraqi connections, according to several intelligence officials.

Anonymous sources can certainly be important, but it is possible to overdo it. The Times overdoes it on a daily basis.

Posted 7:54 AM by Peter Fallow
Post updated to reflect the fact that I'm not sure Hedges was actually in Iraq this time around. I saw a print-edition story in the New York Post that said he wasn't, but the Web version doesn't say that. So, I'm removing the part of my post that says all of Hedges' reporting from Iraq "now comes into question." -- The Editor

MORE 'TIMES' BASHING: Did you see this story? Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times war correspondent, launched an 18-minute tirade that could have been penned by Noam Chomsky at the graduation ceremony for Rockford College. Think I'm kidding about the Chomskyite content? Listen for yourself. I did, and not once did he even mention the kids who were getting their diplomas that day. There wasn't even a "as you go out into the world" bit at the end of his rant. It was just pure bile directed at the Bush administration. No wonder he was loudly and heartily booed, and nearly yanked off the stage.

I'm not saying Hedges doesn't have the right to say what he believes. But I have to wonder about whether it was appropriate to vent his spleen in such a manner at a graduation ceremony. Furthermore, any claims of "objectivity" Hedges may make in his role as a journalist can no longer be taken seriously.

What was he thinking? Apparently, he was thinking that the people in the audience at this liberal arts college were a bunch of brainwashed sheep.

Posted 7:29 AM by Peter Fallow
THE ACTUAL FULL HORROR OF JAYSON BLAIR: My God. I've just read Jayson Blair's interview with the New York Observer, and I'd like to issue a complete retraction to my post from Monday, in which I expressed hope that he could get his life straightened out.

Fuck Jayson Blair. Fuuuuuuuuck him.

This piece of shit is laughing about the lies he passed off as reporting? And, after being coddled in the most unbelievable manner, blames racism for his woes? This upper-middle-class, spoiled-brat con man, who skated into the top echelon of American journalism on racial preferences, is going to capitalize on his fraud by writing a book/movie about Amerikkka's racist corporate structure? Let me tell you something, Jayson. Your ancestors faced actual grinding racism. What you're feeling is the discomfort of knowing you've gotten beneficial treatment you didn't deserve.

Once again, fuuuuuuuuuck him.

And while we're at it, how about a big "fuck you" to this asshat, a black journalism professor who sent an "open letter" to various young minority journalists warning them of the "Blair blacklash." (Yes, apparently it's still Chicago circa 1925 in America's newsrooms, and black reporters are all just Bigger Thomases, powerless in the face of their inevitable persecution.) One paragraph should suffice, You've probably read it elsewhere, but here goes:

By the way, it's amazing the way race works. A few years ago a white reporter for The New Republic named Stephen Glass was fired after it was revealed that he systematically plagiarized and fabricated his work. As I recall, no one decried the diversity culture in which he was hired, nor cast suspicious remarks about the credibility of coddled young white journalists.

I'll leave it to a black journalist to respond:

Those white journalists are seen as individuals. They are not viewed as members of a separate class or designated group, mainly because they were not hired through some special program that appears from afar to hold its beneficiaries to less demanding standards than those outside the program.

Furthermore, I'll let Orlando Patterson, a black Harvard sociologist with a decidedly marxist bent who has spent most of his career analyzing race relations in America, tell you a little something about this country (quote from Arthur Schlessinger's The Disuniting of America):

"The sociological truths are that America, while still flawed in its race relations ... is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa; and has gone through a dramatic change in its attitude toward miscegenation over the past 25 years."

Thank God some "people of color" can see beyond skin color.

Posted 7:20 AM by Peter Fallow
CHALLENGING THE 'TIMES': Stanley Kurtz has a useful column in The National Review that looks at the expansion plans of the New York Times, and continues the argument that the Washington Post should go national to fill the vacuum created by an increasingly on-the-run Grey Lady.

I'm all for that. Sure, the Post's stories are widely read because they're available through wire services nationwide, but it would be great to go into any bookstore or 7-11 in the nation and purchase an edition of the paper that carries a national slant.

Posted 7:03 AM by Peter Fallow
IS THIS SPREADING? The New York Daily News reports that its tabloid rival, the New York Post, lifted a National Enquirer article about Kathie Lee Gifford:

The Post identified its bad boy as Robin Gregg, a freelancer who the paper's brass said 'fessed up to stealing a story from that paragon of journalism the National Enquirer. Some would call that a perfect fit for the fact-challenged Post.

Ouch.

Posted 6:10 AM by Peter Fallow
BLACK JOURNALISTS ON BLAIR: Compare and contrast these two opinion columns on the role of affirmative action in the Jayson Blair fiasco. Here's Jabari Asim in the Washington Post:

The discomfort that I and some other black journalists felt in the wake of the Blair fiasco exposed the frustrating degree to which we are still dependent upon others' ability or willingness to see us as individuals. What makes our plight so painfully clear are the appalling and bizarrely illogical reactions of various white journalists. For all their vaunted liberalness, they have in columns and editorials implicated Blair as an affirmative action blunderer by which all black hires should be judged. It's preposterous to suggest that one reporter's shortcomings indict all programs aimed at increasing newsroom diversity, yet some reputedly knowledgeable observers have argued as much....

I do feel some compassion for Blair, despite my annoyance. His flameout had to hurt, and I get no kicks from anyone's pain. If his disgrace has a bright side, it is that the consequent discussions about diversity in journalism will ultimately show how overwhelmingly white the profession remains.

Take magazines, for instance.

Except at the newsweeklies, most minority employees found at mass-media magazines are answering the phones and emptying the trash. Research the names on the editorial mastheads at GQ, Esquire, Vogue, The Nation, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Harper's, The American Prospect and The Atlantic Monthly--put them all together--and see if you can find enough minority writers and editors to use up all the fingers on one hand. That would be a far more useful exercise than merely raising a ruckus about race.

I especially loved the sweeping and erroneous bit about Blair representing the "standard by which all black hires should be judged." Who in the hell has written that? And then that part at the end, where he claims that raising a ruckus about the racial makeup of certain magazines would be a far more useful exercise than "merely raising a ruckus about race." Huh?

For another perspective, here's Joseph Perkins in the San Diego Union-Tribune:

"Did race have anything to do with the awful case of Brian Walski, the Los Angeles Times photographer who fabricated the photograph out of Iraq earlier this year?" asks a news release from the National Association of Black Journalists.

"Was it a factor with the two Salt Lake City reporters who sold a fabricated story to the National Enquirer for $20,000 in the Elizabeth Smart case?

"Was it a factor with Mike Barnicle, Stephen Glass, Ruth Shalit, Eric Drudis or the dozens of other white journalists who smeared the honorable profession of journalism and lied to their readers?

"Why should it be a factor here?"

Well, here's why: Those white journalists are seen as individuals. They are not viewed as members of a separate class or designated group, mainly because they were not hired through some special program that appears from afar to hold its beneficiaries to less demanding standards than those outside the program.

Indeed, the fact that the Times even has a minority program suggests that its editors believe they have to cut corners to hire minorities. It implies that, if the Times subjected minorities to the same hiring criteria as whites, the newspaper's reporting ranks would look like an audience at a Lincoln Center chamber music concert.

But here's the reality: There are roughly 6,500 black, Hispanic and Asian journalists throughout the fair land, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

A newspaper that boasts the Gray Lady's prestige can certainly attract the best and brightest of those minority journalists without some stigmatizing program.

When the day comes that The New York Times and other news organizations practice colorblind hiring, when minorities are brought on staff as individuals rather than members of a special class, then the failings of one minority journalist – like Jayson Blair – will not reflect badly on all.

Amen to that.

Posted 7:18 AM by Peter Fallow
JAYSON BLAIR UPDATE: OK, I've been away from blogging for the past week while the Jayson Blair story was going nuts. I've read a ton of good commentary on the story, and I'm not going to try to link to all the stuff I've read. But here's a riveting story from Newsweek about Blair. Clearly, he's a deeply troubled young man, and I sincerely hope he can get his life straightened out.

In other news, here's a profile of Macarena Hernandez, who alerted the Times to Blair's plagiarism of her story in the San Antonio Express-News. The author makes some valid points about efforts to diversify the workforce, and how that's not always a bad thing.

I have few problems with programs that identify promising minorities and try to help them get a foot in the door. (Notice I said a foot in the door, NOT a shove all the way up the ladder.) The problem comes when companies adopt aggressive affirmative-action programs that tie the number of minorities hired into a manager's career prospects. That only encourages cutting corners, and is probably the No. 1 factor behind most of the bizarre AA-related hires I've seen in my career. Throwing people who are completely unprepared for a career in journalism into the hyperactive atmosphere of a newsroom just so you can get a little star by your name at the corporate office is a serious problem.

But it can be avoided. Large newspaper chains, which own papers of all sizes, can change their diversity programs so that all rookie reporters, regardless of ethnicity, are required spend at least a year, preferably two or three, at a small newspaper. Yes, the pay is crummy, and yes, the nightlife may suck, but there's no better learning ground. And the Jayson Blairs of the world, rare as they are, would be weeded out.

Meanwhile, Roger Clegg says the Blair affair should have ramifications for all industries.

Posted 6:51 AM by Peter Fallow
CROUCH DISMISSED: Stanley Crouch, one of my favorite essayists, has been fired from Jazz Times magazine:

Crouch, a highly visible commentator and McArthur Foundation "genius" award-winner whose strong opinions and sometimes blustery manner have frequently provoked controversy, was dismissed after the publication of "Putting the White Man in Charge" in Jazz Times' April issue.

In the column, he wrote that white critics have elevated white jazz musicians "far beyond their abilities in order to allow white writers to make themselves feel more comfortable about evaluating an art from which they feel substantially alienated."

Crouch is certainly knowledgeable about jazz and the ways race is actually lived in America (as opposed to the way polemicists portray it), but he's also an iconoclast. It seems he often writes the first thing that pops into his find, because in many of his essays in years past he's explicitly made the point that the most important aesthetic assessments of jazz music have come from white critics, and that whites have been the primary promoters of jazz throughout its history. I guess he's changed his mind, though I haven't read the essay in question.

Like I said, I have often enjoyed Crouch's essays. But his New York Daily News column is god-awful on most days. It's like he's just going through the motions. Maybe his long-in-the-works biography of Charlie Parker will be worthwhile.

Posted 7:03 PM by Peter Fallow
BACK AT IT: The guests have left, and my template is acting up. Let's resume blogging!

Posted 9:15 PM by Peter Fallow
A QUICK NOTE: It seems I can't keep away from this blog, even when I'm having a succession of visitors from out of town. Anyway, I just want to direct anyone who has stumbled onto this site by googling "Jayson Blair" to please go to either Mickey Kaus or Andrew Sullivan, who have been covering the story with greater skill and much more detail than I have.

And a comment about comments. I don't want to ban commenters or delete individual comments; however, I don't have time to mediate between the Angry Black Man and the White Supremacist Guy. You asshats can both take it somewhere else, please.

I realize that discussions touching on affirmative action generate a lot of passion. My feelings about the issue have been shaped because a) it directly slowed my career advancement in at least one case, b) it's done the same thing to a couple of other people I know, and c) I've seen it applied in some silly ways that I've documented here over the past year and a half. I'm not a racist, and I deeply resent people who, for either good or bad, assume that I am because I oppose this divisive, deeply flawed and increasingly unnecessary policy.

That is all. And with that, I bid you all a good night. I'll be checking in periodically, but until regular posting resumes, I'm shutting down the comments function.

Posted 11:07 AM by Peter Fallow
GOING OFFLINE: I'm taking a break from blogging for the next week. I should get back into it on Monday, May 19. As of Sunday night, I had updated some of the Jayson Blair-related posts below. Anyway, take it easy.

Posted 4:38 PM by Peter Fallow
THE FULL HORROR OF JAYSON BLAIR: The New York Times documents, in excruciating detail, the Jayson Blair story. You've got to give the Times credit for coming clean, but still, the level of deception -- both from Blair and his diversity-obsessed bosses -- is absolutely unbelievable.

UPDATE: John Rosenberg over at Discriminations has finally weighed in on L'affaire Blair. Well, sort of. He's actually describing what appears to be more dubious reporting from the Times, in this instance on a story about the affirmative action suit at the University of Michigan.

Posted 10:41 AM by Peter Fallow
ATTENTION JOURNALISTS: Got a newsroom-diversity horror story you'd like to share? Leave a comment here, or e-mail me at media_minder@hotmail.com. I'm taking a few days off from blogging, but I'd like to do a round-up of these and publish them as one long post, or a series of posts. If you request it, I'll change/omit names to protect the guilty/innocent.

Posted 8:54 AM by Peter Fallow
AND EVEN STILL MORE ON BLAIR: Romenesko has several new links on the Jayson Blair controversy. In this story, New York Times managing editor Gerald Boyd (who is black) sticks his fingers in his ears and goes, "I am not listen I am not listening I am not listening":

Boyd bristled when asked if Blair, who is black, figured in a bid by The Times to diversify its mostly white staff of national correspondents, saying, "It's not an issue about diversity, but about a reporter who had issues that allowed him to deceive."

Yes, but it's certainly difficult to imagine a twentysomething in such a lofty position in journalism if he WASN'T black. I'll try to explain.

Here's a personal anecdote. About 10 years ago, a black co-worker of mine at a 12,000-circulation daily was hired to be a copy editor by a 300,000-plus metro daily after just a year of reporting. He wasn't seeking a job; THEY contacted HIM from a list he'd filled out at a minority-recruitment job fair in college, and HE didn't even have any experience as a copy editor! Meanwhile, I was ALREADY an editor, and had been in the business a couple of years longer than this guy, but I had been told a few months earlier by my boss that I might be ready for such a job "in a couple of years."

It was one of those things that made me question my support for affirmative action, and a lot of other things I used to take for granted. (I was a "good liberal" back then. Absolutely swimming in white guilt. I even voted for Clinton -- gladly.) Then came a job interview at a 55,000-circulation paper a few months after that. The formal part of the process went fine. But at an informal lunch, I was told by a rank-and-file reporter that, hey, sorry kid, but you don't have a shot, because our bosses told us they were intent on hiring a minority. Which they did.

Later, I found out he had been fired from his previous job for insubordination. At that point in my career, I'd never been written up, and all of my performance reviews had rated me an excellent employee. (I've only been written up once in a 14-year career, and that was pretty much part of a staff-wide crackdown on errors at the paper where I was working at the time. In other words, everyone was getting written up for mistakes that were basically ignored the month before.)

Welcome to the wonderful world of newsroom diversity. There are so many more stories I could tell, but time won't permit it.

OK, back to Blair.

The Times hopes to publish a Sunday story detailing Blair's forgeries, and they're asking for help.

Finally, Slate's Jack Shafer offers his take on the Blair fiasco. In the process, he cites Janet Cooke, Patricia Smith, Stephen Glass and Jay Forman as famous news fakers, but leaves off Mike Barnicle.

OK, here's a cheap shot: I wonder how all those newsroom diversity promoters who will do anything to hire minorities feel about the fact that three of the six highest-profile journalistic liars of the past 20 years are minorities?

UPDATE: OK, apologies for the cheap shot, as I've explained in the comments. Clearly, Blair's lies have nothing to do with his race, but the hands-off treatment he received from key members of the Times' newsroom leadership, even when it was painfully obvious what a fuck-up he was, clearly does. As the Times' own mea culpa explains, as early as April 2002, "Jonathan Landman, the metropolitan editor, dashed off a two-sentence e-mail message to newsroom administrators that read: 'We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.' " As we know, they didn't stop him; they promoted him! Anyone who claims that affirmative action has nothing to do with this fiasco either has no real-world experience with the policy or is just whistling past the graveyard.

And here's an interesting item from Google. Who had a prominent role in making sure Jayson Blair kept his job when he was under intense scrutiny for his errors at the New York Times? Gerald Boyd. And when Boyd won the National Association of Black Journalist's 2001 Journalist of the Year award, guess who nominated him? Jayson Blair. Hmmmmm. Sounds like they had no problem communicating on that one.

Posted 8:15 AM by Peter Fallow
THIS IS STILL A STORY? It's been eight months, and racial arsonists in Philadelphia are STILL up in arms over the fact that the Philadelphia Daily News fairly and accurately reported some unpleasant news: that virtually all of the fugitive murder suspects in the Philadelphia area are minorities. A groveling apology wasn't enough. Hell, even "diversity" maven Keith Woods of the Poynter Institute (he's black, by the way) is calling bullshit on this one:

"First of all, you can't definitively say somebody is a racist unless you open up their closet and find a hood and white sheets," says Woods. "This leaves the paper in the untenable position of proving they are not racist. How do you prove that?"

For the umpteenth time, read this.

Posted 7:22 AM by Peter Fallow
JUST A THOUGHT: It seems we're having trouble finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (It was the pretense for the war, after all.) Many commenters are questioning whether they even existed. A few others suggest Saddam moved them to Syria.

But I've yet to see a more terrifying scenario bandied about: that these weapons have already been dispersed to terrorists around the world. In other words, they could be in a train station locker in Paris, or a cellar in Rome, or a refugee camp in Gaza, or a self-storage shed in suburban D.C.

It's been going through my mind the past couple of days. Anyone else's?

Posted 6:47 AM by Peter Fallow
DANGEROUS PLACES TO WORK: According to this story, it's the usual suspects -- Cuba, Iraq, Vietnam -- plus places like the West Bank, Gaza, Afghanistan Eritrea, Belarus, Chechnya and Togo.

Posted 6:41 AM by Peter Fallow
STILL MORE ON BLAIR: Howard Kurtz writes a straight-news story on more apparent fabrications and plagiarisms by disgraced New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. Check it out.

Posted 7:28 AM by Peter Fallow
REVOKE THE PRIZE! Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize, that is. The National Review reminds us of another journalistic fraud perpetrated by the New York Times: Duranty's shameful coverage of Stalin's political famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s, a crime that Duranty privately acknowledged claimed 10 million victims even while he filed reports that completely obscured that inconvenient fact.

Posted 7:17 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE TIMES-BASHING: The Weekly Standard examines some contradictory reporting from the New York Times. Check it out.

Posted 7:07 AM by Peter Fallow
THE HERSH-O-METER: Slate's Jack Shafer has a snarky piece on Seymour Hersh, the ace investigative reporter for The New Yorker who has been spectacularly wrong about a great many things since Sept. 11. In fact, you could use Hersh's reporting as a kind of negative gauge of the truth:

Given this extraordinary track record, any thumbs-down flashed by Hersh must be interpreted as a leading indicator that the precise opposite is about to happen.

Give it a look.

Posted 7:01 AM by Peter Fallow
EVEN MORE ON BLAIR: The Washington City Paper has done a masterful job of examining Jayson Blair's coverage of the sniper rampage that gripped the Washington, D.C., area. The City Paper's conclusion:

The Times may have to retract whole swaths of Blair's sniper package, which includes 52 stories spanning last October through April. Week by week, the Times' coverage helped to misshape public opinion on the sniper case—a rampage of carelessness that certainly taints the U.S. media, if not the sniper jury pool.

After reading the City Paper's piece, those who pointed out that Blair's error rate was lower than some veteran Times reporters now must seriously question that line of argument. Blair's errors (including five in one story on a benefit concert) were obviously above and beyond the routine.

But the story of Jayson Blair goes beyond the coddling of an affirmative-action hire. It illustrates a real problem faced by daily newspapers: the lack of time to do a complete and thorough check of facts and sources, and how that can be exploited by someone inclined to do so:

"There's no system that I know of that can protect you from a reporter or editor who sets out to make up untrue things and get them into the paper," says Raines.

In a perfect world, people who besmirch the already deeply troubled name of journalism in such a manner would be forced to stay as far away from a keyboard as possible. Unfortunately, they don't. Stephen Glass, the serial fabricator who was such a deep embarrassment to The New Republic a few years ago, has written a novel based on his experiences.

UPDATE: Matthew Hoy comments on the Blair story, and includes his observations on newsroom "diversity" programs. And here's my experience with this silliness.

Posted 7:51 AM by Peter Fallow
'THE HYPOCRISY OF NOAM CHOMSKY': The New Criterion has a devastating critique of leftist icon Noam Chomsky. One of many great passages:

Chomsky has declared himself a libertarian and anarchist but has defended some of the most authoritarian and murderous regimes in human history. His political philosophy is purportedly based on empowering the oppressed and toiling masses but he has contempt for ordinary people who he regards as ignorant dupes of the privileged and the powerful. He has defined the responsibility of the intellectual as the pursuit of truth and the exposure of lies, but has supported the regimes he admires by suppressing the truth and perpetrating falsehoods. He has endorsed universal moral principles but has only applied them to Western liberal democracies, while continuing to rationalize the crimes of his own political favorites.

There's a lot more. Give it a read.

Posted 7:44 AM by Peter Fallow
BULL'S EYE: The Columbia Journalism Review has its Darts & Laurels feature up. It celebrates the dubious and the honorable in journalism. Check it out.

Posted 7:29 AM by Peter Fallow
EVEN MORE ON BLAIR: Here's a fascinating story on Jayson Blair's plagiarism. It seems the San Antonio Express-News story he ripped off was written by a young woman who had worked alongside Blair at a prestigious internship at the New York Times in the summer of 1998. Was it a bizarre coincidence, or did Blair think that the global solidarity of all oppressed people of color would prevent his crime from being exposed? I guess we'll never know.

Posted 7:59 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON BLAIR: The fallout from the Jayson Blair fiasco continues. Here's Howell Raines:

"Jayson was repeatedly warned about having too many errors and he was also consistently praised for showing journalistic energy and enterprise," Raines said. "But still he had trouble with basics of the craft."

But I suppose giving an incompetent black reporter the boot would have compromised Raines' liberal bona-fides. This episode clearly highlights something many others have written -- that "diversity" is not necessarily for the "underprivileged." Its main beneficiaries often are liberals still suffering under white guilt, who get to pat themselves on the back about how good and decent they are. Meanwhile, a once-great newspaper slides a little further into irrelevance.

Here's a sampling of comments from Romenesko's Letters page:

From DAVID McLEMORE:
...There are surely any number of reasons why Jayson Blair so terribly imploded. Like many here, I lay a much of the blame on the editors at the Times. How many corrections must be written before they did more than urge him to be more careful?

Regardless of why it happened, the responsibility of getting right falls on Mr. Blair. He knew he didn't interview the subject of his story. He knew he borrowed a bit too heavily from another reporter's work. He should know what went wrong. He's the one who did it the wrong way.

___

From THOMAS COLLINS:
As a former journalist, I worked very hard work to get the kind of assignments seemed to fall into Jayson Blair's lap. I cannot recall a day in the 25 years I worked as a journalist at second-tier newspapers that I didn't worry a mistake could land me back covering night cops or out the door entirely.

The explanations given by [New York Times executive editor Howell] Raines and others seem stuffy and pompous and designed to explain the Blairs of the world as aberrations that somehow slipped through a minor crack in the mighty New York Times. I'm embarrassed not only for longevity of Blair's survival and progress in a career for which most of us would have killed, but for the arrogance of Raines and others who nurtured him and encouraged him.

___

From OMAR SOFRADZIJA, Reporter, Peoria (IL) Journal Star:
You know who I feel bad for out of the whole Jayson Blair mess? The person who paid their dues, worked long hours doing all sorts of scrub work, actually graduated from college, did the right things the right way, earned themselves a job interview at The New York Times and lost the job to Blair. Whoever you are, my heart goes out to you. And shame on all the opportunists who always find the career short cut, never give back anything to anybody and whose bylines are more important than what goes underneath.

There are many others, and even a couple that kinda sorta defend Blair, but it seems only Howard Kurtz had the balls to ask the question that needed to be asked:

"Look, this was a promising young black reporter. I wonder if a middle-aged hack would have gotten away with 50 mistakes and still be at that job."

Once again, see this guy's book for more. And Susanna Cornett writes what I would have written:

Does it have anything to do with the fact that he's black? It seems highly likely to me that a reporter making such a rapid rise, without a college degree, in the face of such obvious issues with accuracy, must have something going for him other than a stunning way with words.

And Amish Tech Support makes many other points I would have made.

From my experience, having watched a big city television newsroom undergo a wave of terminations and the management wheels turning (and occasionally grinding themselves into rusty whines), it takes a LOT to build a case for termination for a minority.

-The management takes longer to build the case, fearful of lawsuits should they not have enough proof.
-The nature of each individual incident is small enough that it can easily be dismissed, and the pattern of incidents is either easily swept under the rug or hasn't made the notice of your clientele.
-Instead of wiping out a minority employee, management waits for a less-confrontational method like working up a "falling upwards" promotion to another property or waiting for a contract or necessary downsizing of all staff.
-Other non-minority workers or the tormented supervisor themselves may make mention of the problem employee's minority status ("Why is that incompetent black still here?" instead of "Why is that incompetent boob still here?"), which that employee may use in their defense as steering the disciplinary/skill issue into being a race-related issue.
-Pressure from the community to hire more minorities means having to keep the rotten apples you have on staff now.

Ay-fucking-men, Amish. I've seen the situations you describe happen just like that several times myself.

And Glenn, I'm sorry, but the fact that Johnny Apple has had more corrections than Jayson Blair is fairly irrelevant. Even if Blair had only a handful of errors, his apparent plagiarism on the San Antonio story and his complete mishandling of the sniper story should have been enough to send him packing. The total number of errors merely adds to the proof that Blair was an affirmative-action hire that blew up in Raines' face.

And finally, Mickey Kaus has more.

Posted 7:42 AM by Peter Fallow
REPORTER CANNED: Romensko is all over the story of Jayson Blair, a New York Times reporter who has been fired for plagiarism. It seems this story is very similar to this story from the San Antonio Express-News. And the Washington Post reports on the huge number of corrections the Times has run on Blair's stories

Posted 7:35 AM by Peter Fallow
POWERS SURGE: Here's another solid column from William Powers. This time, he's writing about the Rick Santorum blow-up and more. Give it a look.

Posted 7:20 AM by Peter Fallow
GOOD, AND BAD, EMBED: Slate's Jack Shafer has an exhaustive review of the embedded reporter program. He quotes the journalists who were there on the ground in Iraq, and he highlights the good and bad. Check it out.

Posted 7:33 AM by Peter Fallow
READ THIS: Especially the comments. It's about Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter Carl Prine, who caught flak for grabbing a gun while covering the war in Iraq. He's again responded to his critics.

Posted 7:24 AM by Peter Fallow
HAPPY MAY DAY: Before marching, though, grab a chair, take off your Chairman Mao hat and read this.

Posted 7:15 AM by Peter Fallow
TO BLOG, OR NOT TO BLOG: There's a debate going on over at CyberJournalist.net about whether it's OK for journalists to blog. On the pro-blogging side, it's J.D. Lasica. On the anti-blogging side, it's Eric Meyer.

The loser leaves town.