A personable young repoter on the fast track at the New York Times was Jayson Blair, who in 2003 was busted for fabricating and plagiarizing various kinds of information in his news stories.
The 27-year-old Blair had been an Affirmative Action hire, and opponents of such programs lost no time in making him a one-man argument to do away with preferential treatment in hiring and retention.
The venerable Times, which over the decades has made very strong efforts to fact-check its news and feature copy, suffered considerable embarrassment from the Blair affair.
An internal investigation found a surprisingly large number of instances of these transgressions, and two of Blair's bosses also parted company with the Times: Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, who resigned under pressure a few weeks after Blair's departure.
In 2004, Blair told his side of these events in a book, blaming his troubles on drug problems in his early years and on depression. A year earlier, he had launched a company called Azure Entertainment in Centreville, Virginia.
No comments:
Post a Comment