This made for absolutely riveting reading. What must life be like for Jayson Blair right now? It must be a shrieking nightmare! I think he deserves all of the waking-up-in-a-cold-sweat moments he gets, by the way, but it doesn’t stop me from imagining what it would be like to BE him right now. To be so publicly disgraced.
The image of him hiding out in his Brooklyn apartment, with his laptop, filing dispatches pretending he was in Virginia, his cell phone turned resolutely off … is … it makes me a little bit sick to my stomach. The man is clearly a pathological SOMETHING. That behavior is completely out of control. Lies upon lies upon lies. How in the world did he think he would get away with it??
It seems to me to come down to a question of character. I don’t believe that every single person, when put under extreme pressure, would crack in the same way. (This came to mind when I watched Diane Sawyer’s interview with Manson-murderess Leslie Van Houten who kept saying, lucidly, “You weren’t there. You don’t know what you’d do if you were in that situation.”) I think that’s a load of crap.
Some people, in Jayson Blair’s position, work their asses off, openly make mistakes, try to correct them … try to be the best that they can be. He lied, he cheated, he deceived everybody.
Then there’s this quote from the Times piece:
What haunts Mr. Roberts now, he says, is one particular moment when editor and reporter were facing each other in a showdown over the core aim of their profession: truth.
“Look me in the eye and tell me you did what you say you did,” Mr. Roberts demanded. Mr. Blair returned his gaze and said he had.
Shameless.
Mickey Kaus, over at Slate, has some great commentary on this debacle.
Especially:
NPR’s Melissa Block unearths Howell Raines boasting about the New York Times’ affirmative action program to the National Association of Black Journalists two years ago, after specifically mentioning Jayson Blair as an example of the Times’ successful recruiting efforts. According to Block, Raines said:
‘This campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.’
“Better”?
More importantly, “more importantly”? …
Bad decision-making there. What a debacle.
