May
16, 2003, 1:00 p.m.
Even at the Times!
The
paper will easily survive Jayson Blair.
he
Big Story featuring the New York Times and Jayson Blair is grounds
for twittery — look what happened to the Gray Lady! But the reproaches
give satisfaction only because of the high standards of the newspaper,
and the sense of it that slippages in such a fortress make for great waterfalls.
Those who worked
their way through the 4-page recitation of what Mr. Jayson Blair did came
only, toward the end of the story, to the question that immediately came
instantly to the inquirer's mind. It was: Did he get away with it because
he is an African American? Answer: We don't really know.
And the reason we
do not is that Mr. Blair is a polished con man. Anyone born Jason who
became Jayson, entered the world with a little swagger. Any suggestion
that affirmative action was responsible for his appointment goes instantly
away. A blind reading of his dispatches would see nothing in them to suggest
the amateur, let alone an incompetent. He wrote fluently and with an eye
for detail, even when it proved that the detail was fiction of his own
imagination. Indeed the filigree established him as especially resourceful,
even as the counterfeiter might be so judged who contributes by special
ingenuity to the imposture he is engaged in. If every black 25-year-old
applying for a reporter's commission had equivalent talent, the Times
would have more than its current 5 percent representation of black Americans
on the staff.
No, the question
had to be of preferment, not election. Jayson is a likable fellow, and
his boss Mr. Boyd — singled out, at the Times’s general, closed
meeting, for encouraging him — replied that he encouraged everybody,
that is his manner. Still, there is a cloud of a corporate scandal. We
have a young reporter about whom a senior editor warned a year ago that
he should not be permitted to write, who went on doing so, ending with
a passage of flat plagiarism, but at least it involved a mother who did
exist in Texas whose son was in fact missing.
Having said as much,
nobody has concluded that affirmative action does not play a role at the
New York Times. Indeed, the executive editor Mr. Raines acknowledged
that it does, and defended the practice in the name of diversity, while
insisting that it was not responsible for the apparent immunity of Jayson
Blair. What the Times was responsible for, and accepted the blame
for, is insufficient superintendence, especially following such warnings
as the City Desk had. One thinks of Saudi Arabia and its measures against
terrorists. Insufficient.
But the season for
inspecting the policies of the Times is open, and there are other
complaints that have surfaced. One, done in the closed meeting of Wednesday,
complained of the autocratic executive style of Mr. Raines. But management
styles don't get passed upon by the Federal Drug Administration, and whatever
Mr. Sulzberger thinks about Howell Raines is, quite simply, the last stop,
like the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Florida election. There are those
who believe that a blood sacrifice is in order, much as everyone called
on Cardinal Law to give up his post, not because he was implicated in
the priestly scandal, but because he was in charge, in Boston, when it
happened.
On the question
of affirmative action, one hears an off-beat complaint, this from a seasoned
publisher who smiles, though not entirely indulgently, at the Times’s
sports coverage. "About eleven percent of the readers of sports sections
are women. National sports competition is, pure and simple, a man's world."
He went on to say that the Times’s subscription to equality results
in all but equal space given to women's sports as to men's.
That indictment,
if correct, is affirmative action athwart journalistic realism, with no
Jayson Blairs on the scene, just stolid fem-movement entrepreneurs who
will perhaps never be fully satisfied until a woman wins the World Heavyweight
Championship.
Well, let it be.
The Times will easily survive Jayson Blair, and its devotees will
survive whatever neglect there is of all-male soccer.
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Big Story featuring the New York Times and Jayson Blair is grounds
for twittery — look what happened to the Gray Lady! But the reproaches
give satisfaction only because of the high standards of the newspaper,
and the sense of it that slippages in such a fortress make for great waterfalls.
