Hard News (19 page)

The press queries from other reporters meant there was no longer any way for the
Times
to deal with the situation quietly. Kurtz and Wemple knew they had a juicy scoop on their hands. Kurtz had already held off for a day, and both reporters rushed to post their pieces online. The
Times,
Kurtz wrote, was aware of the situation and was “looking into it.” Wemple’s story indicated Blair might have cribbed from at least one other source—it identified a quote Blair attributed to Edward Anguiano’s sister Jennifer (“I’m just not feeling a lot of hope right now”) that had also appeared in an Associated Press dispatch on April 14.

At 7:03 p.m. on Tuesday, after Kurtz’s and Wemple’s stories were already posted online, Gerald Boyd wrote back to Rivard. “Dear Bob,” Boyd wrote. “Thanks for your letter and the considerate tone it strikes.” Boyd wrote that he remembered Hernandez well from her days at the
Times
and thought of her with “considerable respect and affection.” He requested some time to resolve the problem and promised he’d be back in touch soon.

That night, Blair asked for the sympathy and support of his colleagues. He e-mailed reporters on the national desk to complain about how unfair Jim Roberts was being. He talked to one reporter who was under pressure to file a story of his own about ways to protect against confusing previously published clips with your own work. He broke down crying at least once. “I know this doesn’t erase all the good work I’ve done,” Blair said, sobbing. “It doesn’t change who I am as a person.”

Meanwhile, the paper’s top brass were still scrambling to determine what exactly had happened. The
Times,
like all newspapers, hates embarrassing corrections, and it hates to correct its corrections even more. When the editors finally printed something about Blair’s Anguiano story, they wanted to make sure it was the final word on the matter. Roberts was growing more suspicious, and that night he called the paper’s photo desk and asked for the unpublished shots from the Anguiano story.

On Wednesday, April 30, Gerald Boyd met with Jayson Blair for the first time since he had been alerted about the similarities between Blair’s and Hernandez’s stories. Boyd told Blair that he had always been a vocal advocate for the young reporter’s career, and Blair asked for forgiveness. Despite Blair’s efforts over the past few years to paint Boyd as one of his mentors, this was one of only a handful of face-to-face meetings the two men had ever had. Blair also met twice more with Jim Roberts that day. At the first meeting, Roberts made Blair describe the Anguiano household. Using pictures from the
Times
’s unpublished photo archive as a point of comparison, Roberts was temporarily persuaded the reporter had at least been in Texas. But a couple of hours later, Nick Fox, Blair’s editor on the sniper story, found the AP story that Blair seemed to have plagiarized as well. Roberts exploded. “This is bullshit,” he screamed at him. “I need you to tell me what’s really going on.”

Finally, at 4:00 p.m., Blair met with Bill Schmidt and members of the paper’s legal staff. Blair brought Lena Williams, a representative of the paper’s Newspaper Guild and a three-decade veteran of the
Times,
with him to the meeting. “He just seemed nervous,” Williams says. “I’ve learned in thirty years in this culture, no matter how bad the truth is, just give it to them. He knew me. He knew Bill. I said it would be okay.” Blair, Williams thought, would likely face a suspension for plagiarism.
^*34
“I said, ‘They might not want you traveling all over the country, but that’s not that bad. I wouldn’t doubt if by the 2004 election they didn’t ask you to go back out and do some work.’ ”

Throughout the meeting, which lasted almost five hours, Jayson Blair continued to work the angles. He apologized—for not working hard enough or not spending enough time with sources. He explained how he had confused his notes and promised nothing like that had ever happened before. But as the meeting progressed, Schmidt—a former national correspondent—realized Blair’s story wasn’t adding up. His supposed flight route didn’t make any sense. Blair said he’d been unable to rent a car from Avis or Hertz, because they were closed when he got to the airport. He said he’d slept in the backseat of the car he did finally rent, and that was why he didn’t have receipts from his hotel. After the meeting, back in his office on the corner of the fourth floor, Schmidt quickly confirmed that Blair was lying. The Avis and Hertz counters at San Antonio International Airport were open twenty-four hours a day; the rental agency Blair said he got a car from was not. Schmidt realized then that the paper would need to fire Jayson Blair.

But the
Times
never had the chance. The next morning, Thursday, Blair came in and went straight to Lena Williams. He announced he was going to resign. “He’s so tiny and endearing,” Williams says. “And since I’ve never had children, here was someone I looked on as a son I never had, and he was breaking down.” The previous day, Blair had described a gas station in Los Fresnos that he had visited. Williams still believed that Blair had been in Texas, and she told him she’d call the station. “I said, ‘Sometimes it’s good to be a five-foot-tall black man,’ ” Williams says. “They’d remember him. And that’s when he told me: ‘I don’t want to do this. I’m not going to get through this. Don’t make me do this.’ ” Blair started to sob. “I had a belt around my neck last night and I should have jumped,” he said.

“I just held him,” Williams says. “I was crying, too. I just held him and said, ‘It’s gonna be all right.’ ”

Williams went and told Bill Schmidt that Jayson Blair was resigning from the
Times.
That night, metro columnist Clyde Haberman sent Blair a supportive e-mail. “I said I was an expert on life after death at
The New York Times,
” says Haberman, who had been banned for life from the paper by A. M. Rosenthal when, as the Columbia University stringer, he had inserted a fake graduation award in a write-up of the 1966 commencement exercises.
^*35
“I said I could be a shoulder he could lean on. That was before I learned the full extent of his behavior, of course. Then I probably would have thrown him out a window.”

Elsewhere at the paper, Blair’s editors were realizing they were dealing with something much larger than simple plagiarism. Gerald Boyd got hold of Jim Roberts, who had flown down to Washington to meet with Rick Berke, an editor there, and summoned him back to the office. That afternoon, Roberts and Nick Fox began to check out the stories Blair had written for the paper’s national desk.

“I got back to the office around four-thirty,” says Roberts. “Nick had already put together stacks of Jayson’s war stuff. I took a few, he took a few, and we started making phone calls.” Roberts reached Reverend Tandy Sloan, the father of a dead soldier whom Blair had supposedly written about from Cleveland. “He remembered the story, remembered disliking it,” says Roberts. “He didn’t remember ever talking to Jayson. It was becoming clear by the minute that all these stories were screwed up.” As Fox and Roberts were going over Blair’s stories, Bill Schmidt and his staff also began to look into Blair’s career. They pulled all the records they could find—expense reports, cell-phone records, personnel files. By the end of the day, Boyd told Roberts to return to his regular work. Raines, who had been at his fishing cabin in Pennsylvania, decided he’d come back into the office the next day, and he and Boyd agreed they needed to assign a team of reporters the task of examining Jayson Blair’s career at the
Times.
The solution to bad reporting, Howell Raines said, was good reporting.

Later that day, Jayson Blair sent a letter to both Raines and Boyd in which he apologized for his “lapse in journalistic integrity.”

This is a time in my life that I have been struggling with recurring personal issues, which have caused me great pain. I am now seeking appropriate counseling. Journalism and The New York Times have been very good to me and I regret what I have done. I am deeply sorry.

Raines would later say that he accepted Blair’s apology and that there was no need to demonize the young reporter. But as much as Raines and Boyd may have wanted to close an embarrassing chapter in their stewardship of the paper, they couldn’t. The story was far from over.

—————

O
N
F
RIDAY
, M
AY
2,
The New York Times
ran its first story on the Jayson Blair situation. The piece, which was written by Jacques Steinberg, the
Times
’s newspaper beat reporter, said that Blair had resigned from the paper. Blair, who refused to speak to Steinberg, gave a brief statement to the Associated Press in which he once again said, “I have been struggling with recurring personal issues.” Immediately, New York’s overactive media watchers became preoccupied by news and gossip about Blair’s misdeeds. That same day, Howell Raines told New York’s
Daily News
that Blair had “trouble with basics of the craft,” leading many people to wonder why, if that was so, Blair had been sent to cover some of the past year’s highest-profile national news stories. Raines also acknowledged that he had assigned a team of staffers to check the rest of Blair’s stories for mistakes. “We have good reason to believe we’ve published flawed journalism,” Raines said. That weekend, Howard Kurtz devoted a segment of
Reliable Sources,
his weekly CNN media roundtable, to Blair. On that show, Kurtz raised the race angle, one that would come to dominate the next phase of the story’s coverage. “Look,” Kurtz said, “this was a promising young black reporter. I wonder if a middle-aged hack would have gotten away with fifty mistakes and still be at that job.” Middle-aged
white
hack was more what he had in mind.

Kurtz’s comments were notable because they articulated what others were saying privately. Even in better economic times, it was extremely rare for any reporter, white or black, to begin his career at
The New York Times.
Usually, reporters had to spend time proving their mettle on scrappy dailies in smaller markets. Blair had broken in at the top—his first full-time job was at the
Times.
In those first days after his resignation, Blair’s suspiciously accelerated career path became a focus of many white reporters who didn’t advance as quickly as they would have liked.

Still, even with all the attention the story got that weekend, the Blair scandal looked as if it would remain more or less contained within the industry’s hyperoxygenated and self-referential media columns. That week, the
New York Post
ran some small items on Blair peppered with snarky anonymous quotes. Mickey Kaus, the blogger, posted an item connecting Blair’s flameout to affirmative-action programs. The
Washington City Paper
put together a cover story on the many errors in Blair’s coverage. Slate’s Jack Shafer, who himself had been snookered by a writer who convinced him to run a largely made-up account of something called “monkeyfishing,” wrote about how any editor can be fooled by a reporter determined to perpetrate a fraud. And the
Daily News
’s Paul Colford filled in his readers on what the
Times
said it was doing next.

Over the coming week,
The New York Times
would demonstrate once again its power to shape the national news agenda. A team of five reporters, three editors, and a handful of researchers were digging into Jayson Blair’s career with an intensity and scrutiny usually reserved for corrupt public officials. Their report would transform the Jayson Blair story into a full-blown national scandal, one that would affect the culture of the paper, as well as that of other newspapers around the country, for years to come.

—————

O
N
T
HURSDAY
, M
AY
1, Jacques Steinberg had arrived at the
Times
’s offices only dimly aware of Blair’s situation. Like everyone in the building, he’d read the Kurtz and Wemple pieces but hadn’t heard much else. Steinberg began his tenure at the
Times
as a Washington-based assistant to James “Scotty” Reston, the man closest to a personification of an institutional voice that
The New York Times
had ever had. Reston’s career at the
Times
—which stretched from the eve of World War II through the elder Bush’s administration—included a brief stint as executive editor, but he was best known as a D.C. correspondent and political columnist. Within the
Times,
Reston, who died in 1995, was seen almost as an adopted member of the Sulzberger family. “He adored this newspaper,” Steinberg says. “And he adored the family that ran it.” Steinberg grew up in southern Massachusetts, but his father was born and raised in Brooklyn. Every day, when Steinberg’s dad got home from the hospital where he worked, he’d pick up his son and drive into town to buy a copy of the
Times
from the drugstore. “Here’s my father, going out of his way to pick up this newspaper with this incredibly small print,” Steinberg says. “I learned by example that it was important.”

After his time working with Reston, Steinberg moved from Washington to New York, where he covered education for the paper for eight years. Then, in April 2003, after briefly filling in at the paper’s Los Angeles bureau, he moved over to the newspaper beat. It was a high-profile assignment: Media coverage was one of the areas Howell Raines was most interested in beefing up. Steinberg’s introduction to the industry’s major players occurred on April 27 through 29, at the Newspaper Association of America’s annual conference, which was held that year in Seattle. Once Steinberg got back to New York, he continued cultivating industry sources. On April 30, he had a get-to-know-you dinner with Lachlan Murdoch, one of Rupert Murdoch’s sons. (Lachlan Murdoch is in charge of all of the News Corp.’s stateside publishing interests, including the
New York Post.
)

As the day wore on, word of Jayson Blair’s resignation began to make its way around the newsroom, although there hadn’t been an official announcement. Early that afternoon, Steinberg and Lorne Manly, the
Times
’s acting media editor, were called into Gerald Boyd’s office. Manly, a bespectacled, curly-haired journalism junkie, had been covering the media industry for over a decade—as a reporter for
AdWeek
and
MediaWeek;
as a reporter and editor for
Folio:,
an industry trade magazine; as the “Off the Record” columnist at
The New York Observer;
as one of the first hires at
Brill’s Content,
a now-defunct general interest magazine covering the press; as a media editor for Inside.com, a short-lived online publication covering the information industries
^*36
; and then in a return engagement as the editor of
Folio:.
He was brought to the
Times
as the deputy media editor in early 2002 as one of Howell Raines’s first hires. In April 2003, media editor Dave Smith became an editor at the Sunday paper’s Week in Review section, and Manly settled into his new role.