Hard News (23 page)

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B
Y
M
ONDAY NIGHT
, the reporting team had begun to get a handle on the extent of the deception they were facing. That evening, in an almost five-hour meeting, Jacques Steinberg and David Barstow had met with members of the paper’s news administration office. The team would not be given access to Blair’s employment records; however, Steinberg and Barstow were shown physical copies of Blair’s expense reports, cellphone records, and filed receipts. They took copious notes.

For the rest of the night, the two reporters tried to triangulate Blair’s whereabouts, comparing cellphone records, receipts, datelines, and stories. They realized he had handed in receipts from restaurants and coffee shops in Brooklyn during times when he said he was out of town—Blair submitted a receipt for Tutta Pasta, a Brooklyn restaurant, when he said he was eating with a law enforcement official in Washington. Blair’s cellphone records occasionally indicated that a call was made from somewhere outside New York City—from Washington, for instance. Steinberg and Barstow realized that on the
Times
’s plan, a call from within the home calling zone would show up as blank, so they could determine when he had been making calls from New York City and when he had been elsewhere.

As they continued working through the night, the reporters realized that Blair had, in all likelihood, remained in New York City for most of the last six months, a period during which he was supposedly jetting across the country on assignment. Every time the reporters thought maybe Blair actually had been reporting from the field, they would soon realize they were wrong. “[Later that week], I interviewed [national editor] Jim Roberts about his confrontation with Jayson” about the Anguiano story, Barstow says. “Jim’s telling me how Jayson described this red stucco house, how he described the two Jeeps out front and the rose garden. And how Jim asked for the photo of the house from the photo department, and that Jayson was right on every detail. I began to think maybe he was there.” But it turned out that Blair had simply gained access to Merlin, the
Times
’s internal photo-archiving system. “It was like a horror movie where the killer is actually on the phone inside the house,” Barstow says. “We realized he had actually been in the building when he said he was out in the field.” Increasingly, the reporters were toggling between excitement over the incredible story they were uncovering and dismay at what Blair had done to their newspaper. “None of the reporters took glee in what we were finding,” says Barry. “Having said that, though, there’s no question that our journalistic juices were flowing. We had a big story, and we couldn’t wait to tell it. The only questions were time and space.”

At 9:00 p.m. on Monday, May 5, the team gathered in the page-one conference room for dinner. It was a ritual that would last all week. The conference room sits at the top of the staircase that connects the third and fourth floors. Several times every day, the masthead and desk editors meet here to discuss the next day’s paper, with Al Siegal and the executive and managing editors presiding over the meetings. “We would talk a little bit about what was going on,” Barry says of the team’s dinners, which often featured large amounts of barbecue. “But we’d also just sit there with this sense of exhaustion.”

After dinner, Steinberg and Barstow continued checking records. “It was excruciating,” Steinberg says. “We’re sitting there trying to figure out—okay, if he had breakfast at this restaurant in Brooklyn, maybe he still had time to get to D.C. by the afternoon?” Adam Liptak and Jonathan Glater were making calls to the subjects of Blair’s stories, and Dan Barry was prowling the newsroom, looking for people to interview. “I’d walk around, and it would be like, ‘Uh-oh, here comes IAB,’ ” Barry says, referring to the police department’s Internal Affairs Bureau. “Boy, did we laugh.” Glater had to call several people who had lost family members in Iraq.

“That night, I couldn’t sleep because I was so mad,” he says. “I was calling this person up who suffered an incredible loss. And of all the inane and irrelevant things to talk about, I’m asking, ‘Do you remember talking to such-and-such a reporter?’ It just felt gross.”

“We were seeing indications that he was literally e-mailing the national editor about his progress on a story from another floor in the building,” Steinberg says. “That night, we’re sitting there as a group, saying for the first time, ‘Okay, this could be a gigantic fraud.’ The initial mandate—to correct the record—wouldn’t be enough. To say he got this story wrong was not explaining who is this guy and how did he carry it out and how did he rise?” These were questions the reporters themselves desperately wanted answered.

It was hard not to be shocked. There had been numerous cases of journalistic malfeasance in the past—the
Times
’s Blood Brothers dispatch, say, or the
Post
’s Janet Cooke story. But with the exception of Stephen Glass, a
New Republic
reporter who had completely fabricated a number of feature stories in the late 1990s, there weren’t any comparable cases of widespread, almost sociopathic fraud. And
The New Republic
is a rarefied political weekly that reached a tenth of the
Times
’s daily audience; Glass was writing feature stories about fringe groups he made up out of whole cloth. Blair was stitching his fraudulent accounts into some of the most heavily covered stories of the day. His “reporting” had been featured on the front page time and time again. It was moved on the
Times
’s newswires and reprinted by other papers around the country. The
Times
is the paper of record. What it writes is history. Blair had fabricated history.

Once again, the reporters struggled to find a way to describe the situation. Again, the only word they could think of was “surreal.” “It was an amazing story,” says Barstow. Blair’s use of technology was also startling. “As we went on, we realized the level of journalistic crime here is much worse than some cribbed notes,” Barry says. “He was literally not showing up. It was dawning on us that with cellphones and laptops, this was a whole new age in terms of journalism and integrity. [Blair] showed how someone could get away with this. And to explain this, we wanted to do a classic
New York Times
takeout.”

At the start of Monday night, the five reporters had identified half a dozen stories they had questions about. After an all-night session, Steinberg and Barstow had identified thirty more stories that seemed to be problematic. On Tuesday, Manly reported to Al Siegal that the number of suspect stories was now up to thirty-six—almost exactly half of the seventy-three stories Blair had written since he had been temporarily reassigned to the national desk in October. “Siegal just said, ‘Well, it looks like it’s more than a half-page story, now, doesn’t it?’ ” Manly says.

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T
HE REST OF THE WEEK
was marked by the growing tension between the reporting team and the paper’s two top editors, as both sides realized the extent to which Raines and Boyd would necessarily figure in any accurate explanation of the Jayson Blair saga. “[Monday, May 5] was the one time Howell got really mad at me,” says Kramon. In a meeting with Kramon and Manly, Raines barked out that he wanted to know why none of the reporters had asked to speak with him yet—if he was running the show, Raines said, he’d damn well have talked to the people in charge. “He was saying that I didn’t know how to do an investigation, that I was doing it all wrong,” Kramon recalls. “He was as angry as I’ve ever seen him.

“He was realizing it was getting out of control. This was a far worse problem than anyone had realized. But I just said, ‘I’ve been through enough of these, and I’m gonna do it the way I always do it,’ ” Kramon says. “I knew the guys were already working eighteen-hour days. There was no way I was going back in that room and telling them I caved, because they just would have killed me.” Unbeknownst to him, Raines’s intractability was helping to strengthen the bond between the reporters and their editors. He was also painting his own portrait as the classically combative, defensive subject of an investigative report. Kramon stood firm. “I was used to having chief executives in my face [because of reporters’ articles],” he says. “You have to ask yourself, Do you think you have a case? And if you do, you stick with it. And in this case it was pretty clear we had a case, so I just said to Howell, ‘I’m working with a bunch of professionals. You’ve got to let us do our job.’ ”

Gerald Boyd, meanwhile, took the opposite tack and went out of his way to appear congenial. On Monday afternoon, he walked up the staircase to the fourth floor and walked into the room where the team was working. Everyone froze, and several of the reporters moved to cover their screens. Lorne Manly stood up and walked over to the door. “I just wanted to see if anyone needed anything,” Boyd said. Manly walked him outside. Boyd later complained about what he interpreted as “adversarial body language.” Manly explained to him that the reporters were just trying to do their job and were taken by surprise when he charged into the room.

“We knew they wanted us to talk to them,” says Liptak. “In the ordinary course of things, you’d jump. But we wanted to move as methodically as we could from start to finish.” Liptak agreed he would talk to Boyd. Jacques Steinberg, who’d already dealt with Arthur Sulzberger as part of his beat, would talk to the publisher. And Barry and Barstow would interview Raines.

Liptak met with Boyd, more to appease the managing editor than to ask specific questions. “I found him to be very defensive, in a very unseemly way,” Liptak says. “It made me think that he viewed Jayson’s story and his own as quite intertwined. He seemed to feel there was a whole lot riding on this. He kept ticking off all the things he and Jayson didn’t do together. ‘We didn’t have lunch, he never came to see me in my office, we never talked about his career.’ For him to be running for cover like that struck me as very unbecoming. The reality is, he
did
play a very significant role in Jayson’s advancement.”

Dan Barry scheduled an appointment with Raines. “I just went and said, ‘I hear you have something you wanted to say,’ ” Barry says. Raines was welcoming and friendly. He focused on Blair’s record of corrections—how corrections weren’t necessarily a good indication of a reporter’s progress, how some of the corrections were due to caption errors or simple misspellings. “We had already gone so far beyond that,” says Barry. “But I just heard him out.”

As the week went on, the reporters continued interviewing their bosses. Jonathan Glater had now teamed up with Adam Liptak to talk to Boyd. It wasn’t a job he was eager to do. “When we were talking about who was going to talk to whom in the newspaper, I was not particularly eager to interview either Howell or Gerald,” he says. “As a young reporter who had not been at the
Times
that long, I would be interviewing them, and at the same time they would be evaluating me.” But Glater agreed it made more sense for both reporters to be present. They interviewed Boyd on Wednesday and again on Friday.

By this point, the reporters had zeroed in on the decision to send Blair to help cover the sniper shootings around Washington, D.C., as a crucial moment in their story. Liptak and Glater pressed Boyd repeatedly: Had he been the one to recommend Blair to Jim Roberts? “Several times, in a very bureaucratic and disingenuous way, he said something along the lines of how this had been a consensus decision and he had been the most senior person in the room,” Liptak says. Blair’s name had first come up during a meeting that included Boyd, associate managing editor Andrew Rosenthal, and Roberts. “Everyone seems to remember it being Gerald’s call,” Liptak says. “I don’t think even Gerald disputes that. But he’s holding on to this notion that there’s a consensus. The
Times
is not a consensus-decision type of place. Certainly not at that juncture in its history.” Boyd seemed to be formulating a defense that would enable him to hold on to his job rather than helping the reporters come up with the most accurate picture possible.

Steinberg, meanwhile, began talking to Arthur Sulzberger on Thursday. That day, Steinberg told the paper’s publisher that there were at least three dozen stories by Jayson Blair that contained plagiarized or fabricated material. “I was calling him as a source, and I asked him to keep this to himself. I felt strongly and the team felt strongly that we as a newspaper needed to be the first to report this number,” Steinberg says. Sulzberger, Steinberg says, was unequivocally accepting of that arrangement.

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O
N
M
ARCH
1, 2003, C. J. Chivers, a reporter and former marine, sent metro editor Jon Landman an e-mail from Iraq, where he was stationed. Chivers had spent weeks at ground zero after September 11 and had distinguished himself as one of the paper’s shining talents. “I have a story,” Chivers wrote to Landman. He continued:

[Photographer] Ruth Fremson and [reporter] David Rohde showed up here a few days ago . . . and, no shit, David had two partial copies of the paper. It was quite a smuggle, because the papers provided a chance to show our translators and drivers the thing we make very [
sic
] day. I handed the larger edition to my translator, who is a young MD, and after a minute or two of deliberate study he snatched the Metro section and started to flip through it at this quick speed, amazed.
“All this news is from New York”
he said.
“Just from New York?”

Then he used a Kurdish word, twice:
“Zora! Zora!”

Roughly translated, it means “So much! So much!”

He’s been with us for a while, and he more or less knew that The Times was special, but the page-by-page, tactile experience of reading the broadsheet rounded him out, and for a while after his face was really full of something that looked like pride. It was a good moment for me, because I’ve been a bit lost in my notes and isolation here, and it brought me back, throughout the day, to remembering what a whole bunch of our readers think. . . .