A lot of lies and just as many excuses

If you ever sat through an introductory logic class, you’ll probably recall the Cretan paradox.

As the poet Epimenides bluntly put it: “All Cretans are liars.”

Epimenides, however, was from Crete.

His statement could be true if -- and only if -- it was false. Hence the paradox or, more precisely and usefully -- especially for the purposes of this review -- the antinomy, which is the logical term for a statement that contradicts itself.

It’s helpful to keep this 2,700-year-old brainteaser in mind when approaching “Burning Down My Masters’ House,” Jayson Blair’s self-pitying and unreliable account of the circumstances he alleges surrounded the multiple acts of fraud and deception he committed while a reporter at the New York Times. The discovery of his journalistic crime spree turned the paper inside out and, ultimately, led to the resignations of then-Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd. More widely, Blair’s misconduct set off a national argument about prevailing reportorial standards and -- because this particular crook happened to be African American -- about affirmative action in the nation’s newsrooms.

Blair owes the readers and colleagues he betrayed a credible explanation and as sincere an apology as he can muster. “Burning Down My Masters’ House” is neither.

This is a vile book, as distasteful a thing as you’re likely to handle without gloves.

Despite the dust jacket pretenses to candor, it’s clear that, however else he may have changed, Blair retains the con man’s talent for misdirection. His memoir purports to be about insight and explanation, but it is really about shifting responsibility and settling scores. According to his publisher, Blair “does not push responsibility for his actions onto anyone else....”

Really?

By his own account, there is hardly a hackneyed excuse to which Blair, the liar and plagiarist, does not have recourse: He has been variously victimized by racism, childhood sexual abuse, undiagnosed manic depression, self-medication with alcohol and cocaine and the institutional insensitivity of his former employer, whose newsroom he portrays as a kind of low-rent version of the Borgia court. If we still belled lepers, it’s a safe bet this guy would claim to have Hansen’s disease.

Still, you do get a sense of the charming energy and disarming fluency that led the Times editors to regard him as a promising young reporter. Consider the book’s opening sequence:

“I lied and I lied -- and then I lied some more. I lied about where I had been, I lied about where I had found information, I lied about how I wrote the story. And these were no everyday little white lies -- they were complete fantasies, embellished down to the tiniest made-up detail.

“I lied about a plane flight I never took, about sleeping in a car I never rented, about a landmark on a highway I had never been on. I lied about a guy who helped me at a gas station that I found on the Internet and about crossing railroad tracks I only knew existed because of aerial photographs in my private collection. I lied about a house I had never been to and decorations and furniture in a living room I had seen only in photographs in an archive maintained by Times photo editors.

“In the end-justifies-the-means environment I worked in, I had grown accustomed to lying....”

Note the subtle shift -- from breathless, almost break-neck candor to weary excuse. Who among the Times editors and reporters -- other than Blair -- believed the end justifies the means?

There are no examples in this book of anyone at the Times who behaved in any way like Blair. There are, however, a number of admissions of misconduct and criminality that predate his now notorious fraud spree. Some are minor acts of immature rebellion, such as habitually misusing company cars and fiddling with his expense account. Others go to the heart of the author’s human and professional integrity. For instance, in a genuinely off-handed way, Blair describes how, while working on a business story, he traded favorable references to an unnamed company for sex. He goes on to allege that such practices were common among other unnamed Times reporters.

Really?

Blair describes his own descent into cocaine addiction with all the usual sordid references to trading sex for drugs and doing a little dealing on his own. He also recounts numerous cocaine parties that he claims involved large numbers of unnamed Times reporters and editors.

Really?

Along the way, Blair is able to slip in notorious examples of the Times’ institutional failures and juxtaposes them with the treatment he received for his misconduct. Thus Walter Duranty, the infamous foreign correspondent who toadied to Stalin and suppressed news of the terrible Ukrainian famine, comes up more than once. In one tale that is unintentionally comic, Blair recounts being sent to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Crown Heights to look into charges of possible fraud by a Hasidic developer. To Blair’s shock, nobody in this famously insular community, which has a history of tense relations with African Americans from nearby neighborhoods, will talk with him. Poor Jayson doesn’t understand the silence, until he returns to the office and goes into the archives and discovers that the Times inadequately covered the Holocaust. That, he decides, is why nobody in Crown Heights will speak to him.

More disillusion for poor Blair. Everything, in fact, disappoints him.

He finds that the media often seem to care more about affluent white people than about massacred Rwandans. He doesn’t get the credit he feels he deserves for all his terrific work. He discovers to his horror that young reporters sometimes are used as legmen and women as rewrite people -- and they don’t get bylines! Blair and other reporters are sent by their editors into potentially dangerous situations -- like the attack on the World Trade Center -- and nobody seems to care that witnessing all this death and destruction makes them feel bad. Blair, in fact, feels so bad that he concocts a lie about having a relative who died in the attack on the Pentagon so that he can get out of having to contribute to the Times’ prize-winning series of biographical sketches of those who died in the twin towers.

The duty of witness is the iron imperative at the heart of every journalist’s vocation, and it is hard to imagine a more chilling evasion of that obligation. The subtext of this story is really immaturity and a degree of self-absorption breathtaking even by contemporary standards. Blair and his publisher would like to put race and the institutional shortcomings of the New York Times at the center of his story. But his memoir contains not a single credible incident in which the Times or his other employers treated him in a racially insensitive or discriminatory fashion. Nor, despite his frequent allusions to the Times’ institutionalized mistreatment of its reporters and editors, does he provide a convincing example. Off the evidence of this book, Blair was treated just about like any other young reporter. Some of his editors liked him and encouraged his work and others didn’t.

So what else is new?

If Blair’s apologia has a particular villain, it is the Times’ then-metro editor, now assistant managing editor, Jonathan Landman, who is singled out as an opponent of attempts to diversify the paper’s reporting staff and as the opponent of the author’s advancement. Landman, you may recall, wrote a memorandum in April 2002 in which he warned his colleagues, “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.” Blair’s resentment notwithstanding, there is no evidence that Landman saw in the young journalist anything but an immature, reckless, disrespectful young reporter with an astonishing penchant for mistakes and an almost comical overestimation of his own abilities. That’s exactly the person unconsciously portrayed in this book, and much that was hurtful and even tragic could have been avoided if other Times editors had been as clear-eyed.

At the end of the day, “Burning Down My Masters’ House” is incredible not only because of the author’s transparently base motives but also because he is a proven liar who again and again demands that his readers accept his account of critical events without the corroboration or attribution required to overcome prudent skepticism.

We’re back where we started -- with the liar’s paradox.

Bertrand Russell once remarked that he found paradoxes distasteful because he was unable to distinguish those that contained a profound truth from those that are merely nonsense. Jayson Blair may have tarted up his brief but sordid career with a fashionable litany of talk show topics, but it’s really a plain old-fashioned story about absence and missing pieces. It’s about the lack of things, like character and integrity. *