Ripples of Blair affair widely felt

Magazine writers of a certain age recall that the New Yorker’s legendarily rigorous fact-checkers once required that every assertion of fact be supported by two sources -- unless it came from the New York Times.

Now, in what inevitably will be known as the paper’s post-Jayson Blair era, such confidence would seem not simply amusingly provincial, but also misplaced. Plumb the complex feelings engendered by that sense of loss and one begins to understand why a 27-year-old reporter’s fraud has aroused such intense interest not only in the United States, but in every part of the world where the Anglo-American style of journalism is practiced.

In the 107 years since the Ochs-Sulzberger family purchased the New York Times, the fortunes of other publishing dynasties and their properties have waxed and waned, but the Times’ high-minded ambition and steady qualitative progress have made it the gold standard among those who believe that honorable newspaper journalism is not simply a profit center, but a servant of the democratic polity and its common good.

As with any currency, devaluation makes everyone who holds it poorer.

“The Times’ historically unique devotion to the twin gods of democracy and an informed electorate have made it the bulletin board of the American elite and those who admire it around the world,” said Marty Kaplan, who directs the Norman Lear Center at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications. “In the process, the Times has become not simply an unprecedented community of knowledge, but also -- with the passing of the great network newscasts -- the last common culture shared by Americans who care about public affairs.”

In that common culture, according to Kaplan, the paper has become “a kind of Vatican for people who continue to believe in the reality of essences like truth, accuracy and fairness. In our postmodern world, ‘knowingness’ is the new religion, and the very notion of accuracy -- in the sense of getting things right -- seems rather quaint. The Times and newspapers that share its values are among the few intellectual institutions left willing to stand up and say not only that it’s possible to get things right, but also that it matters when you do.”

Unlike the Vatican, Kaplan points out, newspapers’ willingness to admit their fallibility increases their credibility. “People regard the size of their correction pages as evidence of good faith,” he said. “Readers understand and accept how difficult it may be to see things clearly through the fog of war; what they’re finding hard to accept in this case is the suspicion that this scandal occurred because of the fog of the newsroom.”

That ambivalence creates a particular problem for the Times because the same qualities that led Blair to deceive his readers and editors are now allowing him to exploit the situation to his own end and -- in the process -- inflict further damage on his former employers.

A number of his former colleagues have told the Los Angeles Times that, last spring, Blair returned from one of his unexplained absences and told them he had been in rehabilitation for a cocaine problem. Newsweek subsequently has reported that he was treated for alcoholism and manic depression as well. In fact, he posed for the cover of this week’s issue of the magazine, defiantly looking past a headline that reads: “The Secret Life of Jayson Blair.”

According to New York Daily News business writer Paul D. Colford, Blair “took a break from efforts to score a movie and book deal to pose for the cover.... Dragging on a cigarette and looking right at the camera, Blair may have been paying back the Times for anger he’s said to feel over Executive Editor Howell Raines’ public disclosure [in the Times’ own account of the scandal last week] that his former reporter spent time in an employee assistance program. Such programs, which provide counseling for emotional, drug and alcohol problems, typically offer confidentiality.”

The Newsweek cover photo, incidentally, was shot by Edward Keating, who quit the Times earlier this year after he was alleged to have staged a news photo. (Perhaps there is an emerging postmodern sense of revenge at work here.)

Early Tuesday, Blair, who already has signed with literary agent David Vigliano, told CNN that “ ‘race, substance abuse and psychological disorders’ played a much more ‘nuanced role’ ” in the scandal than yet has been reported. He said he plans to “write and share my story so that it can help others to heal.”

This is definitely one of those postmodern affairs in which shame will play no part. There will be “healing” ... and maybe even closure.

The prospect of watching all this unfold is one of the things that continues to fuel the anger of current and former New York Times journalists against Raines, Managing Editor Gerald Boyd and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

One current reporter, who declined to be named, said that “everyone who hasn’t had the benefit of being one of Howell’s favorites is still seething, particularly people in the Washington bureau.”

Another reporter said, “This business with Jayson wasn’t just about race or just about an obsession with youth, or just about cronyism or just about not listening to anybody else -- all of which have been part of Howell’s administration. This was about all those things coming together in one perfect storm called Jayson Blair. But knowing that’s true doesn’t make you feel any better.”

A distinguished former Times journalist, who also asked not to be identified, said that “what is most disturbing about all this is the sense that it goes to the publisher because of who he is -- an executive who wanted a newer, hotter, quicker kind of paper that relied on its stars. It also leads to Howell and who he is -- not just an authoritarian personality who plays favorites, but a talented and insecure guy with a rather thin bio for somebody in that job. He is, however, an incredibly deft politician, who knows how to keep the family that employs him happy.

“In the end, the worst mistake both he and Arthur arrogantly made was to encourage a diversity of faces rather than a diversity of opinions in their newsroom.”