A sweeping journalistic mea culpa

American journalism seldom has produced anything quite like the extraordinary act of contrition the New York Times published Sunday as its account of the systematic fraud perpetrated by 27-year-old reporter Jayson Blair, who resigned from the paper earlier this month.

The only precedent for so sweeping an admission of failure and wrongdoing that comes to mind is the special section the Los Angeles Times published after it was revealed that the wall between the paper’s advertising and editorial departments had been deliberately breached during production of a Sunday magazine focused on the opening of Staples Center.

The candid and public mea culpa for the Staples affair notwithstanding, sweeping changes subsequently were made in the Los Angeles Times’ newsroom. Sunday’s New York Times account of its scandal concludes with comments by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher and chairman of its parent company. Sulzberger said that while the Blair affair pointed to a need for better communication within the paper’s newsroom, there would be no hunt for scapegoats. “The person who did this is Jayson Blair,” he said. “Let’s not begin to demonize our executives -- either the desk editors or the executive editor [Howell Raines] or, dare I say, the publisher.”

But despite the New York Times’ extraordinarily detailed explication of Blair’s career within the paper and the jaw-dropping scope of his deceit, it seems unlikely that the coming weeks of controversy and reflection will not bring with them additional assignments of responsibility.

The Times’ narrative account -- which was put together by five reporters, including Adam Liptak, a lawyer -- begins in the upper left-hand corner of the first page and extends across two full pages within the first section. Two subsequent pages are filled with a story-by-story examination of the 73 reports Blair had filed since October, when he went from the sports department to roving national correspondent assigned to major stories.

More than half those stories -- 38 in all -- were unreliable, the Times found. Seventeen of them contained factual errors; six contained plagiarized material; in 29 instances, Blair affixed fraudulent datelines to his reports, claiming to be where news was breaking when, in fact, he was home in Brooklyn. The Times invited its readers to “report any additional falsehoods in Mr. Blair’s work” to a special e-mail address.

It is hard to imagine a more humbling plea from a news organization that a little more than a year ago was celebrating the record seven Pulitzer Prizes it received for its coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks.

To other analysts, Blair’s story represents a cautionary tale that extends beyond the Times. “One would have to say there is getting to be something of a tradition of trouble caused by young journalists with unbridled ambitions and hyperventilated notions of careerism,” said Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Schell noted that in the Times account, Raines, the executive editor, said that -- despite Blair’s troubled record of errors and erratic personal behavior -- he had encouraged his assignment to the Washington, D.C.-area sniper story because the reporter was “hungry.”

“I flagged that word immediately,” Schell said. “Hungry is a sword that cuts two ways. I certainly know what Howell means, in that you want someone who will work hard and will make his journalistic craft the most important thing in his life. But the mutant form of that is

The least credible and complete portion of the Times’ account is its categorical denial that the unusual tolerance and solicitude the paper accorded Blair, who is African American, had anything to do with his race. Like other major American news organizations, the Times has in recent years made strenuous efforts to compensate for the decades of discrimination that kept women and minority reporters out of their newsrooms. The New York Times, in particular, has had demonstrable difficulties recruiting and retaining black reporters and editors.

The Times report is candid about the severe criticisms directed at Blair by the two metropolitan editors -- Joyce Purnick and Jonathan Landman -- prior to his assignment to the paper’s national staff. It is less forthcoming about the close mentor-protege relationship that apparently existed between Blair and the Times’ managing editor, Gerald Boyd, who also is African American. By the Times’ account, Boyd was head of a committee that recommended Blair be hired, despite the reservations of other editors. Boyd, along with Raines, pushed the inexperienced reporter with a poor record onto the prestigious national staff.

What the Times does not note is that in 2001 it was the tyro Blair who nominated Boyd for the National Assn. of Black Journalists’ journalist of the year award for his role in producing the Pulitzer Prize-winning series “How Race Is Lived in America.” When Boyd subsequently was promoted to managing editor, according to sources at the Times, Blair was selected to write the announcement for the paper’s in-house newsletter.

While opponents of newsroom diversity are bound to make much of these facts, they stand just as strongly as an argument for making sure that women and minorities are represented in appropriate numbers. It may be that the paucity of black reporters at the Times led editors there to make extraordinary -- and ultimately disastrous -- accommodations for a clearly troubled young reporter.

“It is my experience that every media outlet, particularly the New York Times, is very conscious of its need to diversify its newsroom,” said Berkeley’s Schell. “When they come to recruit our graduates, they are most interested in filling their diversity needs. They want the minority graduates, but they don’t have any ready provision to help them through the system. It’s like a ladder with rungs missing.”

When someone puts his foot where something solid ought to be and finds only air, he falls. Sometimes, he drags others with him.