Disgraced reporter Jayson Blair publishes his memoirs today - but how much publicity should he get, asks Liz Halloran
As Jayson Blair began his book-selling blitz in the US yesterday with the first of a string of high-profile television appearances, newspapers are weighing how much ink to spill on the former New York Times reporter whose serial plagiarism and fabrication triggered a massive journalism scandal last year.
"This presents something of a conundrum," says Eric Gibson, leisure and arts features editor at the Wall Street Journal. "On the one hand, you don't want to give somebody like that any more free publicity and implicitly thereby credit them or honour them. On the other hand, it's news."
Blair (28), whose new tell-all book, Burning Down My Masters' House: My Life at the New York Times, will be published today, resigned from the newspaper last May when his plagiarism of a single story was discovered. The San Antonio Express-News accused the paper of plagiarism in Blair's "on-the-scene" account of the anguish of a missing soldier's mother in Los Fresnos, Texas. The reporter did not go there and apparently added graphic detail taken from archives.
That led to an avalanche of similar charges and an exhaustive examination of his work by the New York Times, which found that Blair routinely fabricated quotes and sources and repeatedly lied about his whereabouts when he was fashioning phoney stories. One of the most blatant examples of Blair's fabrications was the reaction of the family of Pte Jessica Lynch after her capture in Iraq. Blair wrote that Lynch's father "choked up as he stood on his porch overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures". There are no tobacco fields or pastures visible from the West Virginia house and the family later said Blair never visited or talked to them.
The scandal ultimately toppled the newspaper's two top editors, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, and sent the US journalism community into paroxysms of self-examination.
Blair's book and public re- emergence - he appeared on an hour-long NBC Dateline yesterday - is stirring equal measures of distaste and resignation in the newspaper profession he disgraced.
"Coming across news about Jayson's misbegotten endeavours is like coming across a car accident," says former Philadelphia Inquirer managing editor Steve Lovelady. "You don't want to look but you can't resist."
Most major newspapers are planning to review the book. Even the New York Times, which has gone through some convulsions over how to handle the book's release, will publish a review, on March 14th.
Last week Blair's former newspaper ran a report about the book, quoting Blair as writing, "I lied, I lied - and then I lied some more", and detailing his drug, alcohol and psychological problems. Top Times editors sent a memo to staffers calling Blair an "admitted fabricator" and saying the book " imaginary blame". In response, Blair's publisher, New Millennium Press in Beverly Hills, California, accused the newspaper of bad-mouthing its contents, as part of "a concerted campaign to try to hurt the book".
Gibson says he and Wall Street Journal books editor Erich Eichman decided after a brief conversation to run a review of Blair's book, but to partner it with a review of another book about a journalistic scandal.
"I don't think we can ignore something like this, but I also think exhibitionists should only be indulged to the minimum extent possible," Gibson says. "By not singling it out, there's an implicit judgment that we're downplaying it."
In Burning Down My Masters' House, Blair blames his downfall on his own demons - alcohol and cocaine abuse and manic depression - along with the paper's "cut-throat culture". He writes that his lies were "used by those with axes to grind against minorities to justify their opposition to affirmative action. Some might hold me responsible for not foreseeing the results of my actions, but my behaviour was first and foremost an act of self- destruction. I am the master of my own house. And I destroyed it".
Blair admits he pretended to file stories from around the country without leaving New York, but even some of his New York stories were fabricated. He reveals a previously undisclosed incident in which he made up an interview with a trader who had fled his office in tears amid the losses that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.
Peter Johnson, media columnist at USA Today, has already written briefly about Blair's coming media blitz and believes that the still unfolding story is newsworthy because of the havoc he wreaked on the US's foremost newspaper.
"His book is newsworthy to the extent that he created one of the biggest journalism scandals in history, a scandal at the paper of record," says Johnson.
But Blair's questionable fame will continue to grow, whether or not he gets the newspaper exposure he needs to sell his books, predicts Matthew Felling of the Center for Media and Public Affairs.
"In an America where outrage is the ultimate marketing tool, he's riding the wave of celebrity, cashing in on journalistic sin," says Felling. "Today's media embraces fame, no matter how shamefully it was acquired."
- (Los Angeles Times/Washington Post News Service)