There are so many smellier corpses in the New York Times'
mausoleum, not to mention that larger graveyard of truth known as the Fourth
Estate, that it's hard to get too upset about what Jayson Blair did. Oh, to
be sure, he made up a bunch of not very important stuff, and he's
embarrassed the hell out of his former colleagues and publisher.
But from all the editorial hand-wringing you'd think he'd
undermined the very foundations of the Republic. It reminds me of a New York
Times editorial back in 1982, commenting on what began with my own expose of
Christopher Jones, a young man who had written an article in the New York
Times magazine about a visit to Cambodia during which he claimed to have
seen Pol Pot through binoculars.
In this same piece Jones made the mistake of plagiarizing an
entire paragraph from Andre Malraux's novel "La Voie Royale," and I pointed
this out in a column in the Village Voice, adding the obvious point that
Jones' binoculars must have been extremely powerful to have allowed Jones to
recognize Pol Pot, let alone describe his eyes as "dead and stony."
My item stirred the Washington Post to point an accusing finger.
Then the Times itself unleashed a huge investigation of the wretched Jones
and ran a pompous editorial proclaiming that "It may not be too much to say
that, ultimately, it debases democracy."
I remember thinking at the time that as a democracy-debaser
Jones looked like pretty small potatoes, and it's the same way with Jayson
Blair now. He made up quotes, invented scenes and plagiarized the work of
other reporters, and if senior Times editors had not been as optimistically
forgiving as, say, the Catholic hierarchy in dealing with a peccant priest,
Blair would, and should, have been promptly fired after his second major
screw-up.
But in the larger scale of things, these improprieties are of no
great consequence. The people into whose mouths he put imaginary words, and
from whose imagined front porch he pretended to see tobacco fields instead
of tract homes are not notably put out. Ordinary Americans reckon that since
you shouldn't believe a word of anything you read in a newspaper or hear
over the airwaves, what's so different about Jayson Blair?
The biggest story Blair was involved in was the Washington
sniper story. Deployed by his editors into the media-feeding frenzy
following Muhammad and Malvo's arrests, he invented quotes that he
attributed to unnamed prosecutors and FBI officials, and which they then
angrily denounced. Again, these fabrications don't seem to have had much
effect on anything.
But day after day, in the New York Times and other major
newspapers, one comes across blind quotes, dropped by "White House sources"
or "senior administration officials," relayed by reporters and columnists
mostly without any warning label alerting the public that such-and-such a
quote was a volley in some savage bureaucratic feud and should be regarded
with extreme suspicion.
The Jayson Blair scandal comes on the heels of what was one of
the most intensive bouts of botched reporting, wild speculation and
straightforward disingenuous lying in the history of American journalism, a
bout that prompted an invasion, many deaths and now -- given the way things
are currently headed -- the likelihood of mass starvation. In other words,
the lousy reporting really had consequences.
The invasion of Iraq was premised on the existence of weapons of
mass destruction. None has yet been found, and most of the U.S. detective
teams are now wanly returning home. Did the New York Times assist in this
process of deception? Very much so. Just look through the clips file of one
of its better-known reporters, Judith Miller.
It was Miller who first launched the supposedly knowledgeable
Iraqi nuclear scientist Khidir Hamza on the world, crucial to the U.S.
government's effort to portray a nuclear-capable Saddam. It was Miller who
most recently wrote a story about a supposed discovery of a chemical WMD
site, based entirely on the say-so of a U.S. military unit about an Iraqi
scientist whom Miller was not permitted to identify, let alone meet and
interview.
Thus far there's been no agonized reprise from the Times on its
faulty estimate of the credibility of Hamza. And though Blair's fabrications
about the home-coming of Jessica Lynch were minutely dissected, neither the
Times nor any other has had nothing to say about the charges made in the
London Times that the "heroic" rescue of Lynch was from an undefended
hospital under circumstances very different and less creditable than those
heralded by a Pentagon desperate for good publicity during a time when the
invasion seemed to have faltered amid unexpectedly stiff resistance.
In fact, for the Times, the Blair scandal might well turn out to
be a PR boost for the newspaper, proof that it is manly enough to 'fess up
properly and take its punishment, that Blair was but one lone bad apple in a
sound barrel, an apple furthermore that only got into the barrel because of
a laudable indulgence toward an African-American, forgiven his sins because
he was black.
As Glen Ford, who writes a acridly brilliant Web commentary, the
Black Commentator, remarks apropos a theme of much white punditry on Blair,
that somehow it's all the fault of affirmative action, "Black people bear no
onus for white incompetence in selecting Black people to carry out white
corporate missions."
Then Ford contrasts the humdrum fabrications of Blair with a
run-of-the-mill piece of reporting that appeared on May 5, in a report by
Times-man Adam Nagourney. Nagourney discussed the televised Democratic
primary debate in South Carolina. There was only one problem, and it
apparently didn't bother Nagourney's editors. He mentioned only six of the
nine candidates: Lieberman, Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt, Dean and Graham. In
over 1,000 words, Nagourney not only failed to once note the existence of Al
Sharpton, Carole Moseley-Braun or Dennis Kucinich. The two Blacks and the
leftist got purged from the newspaper of record.
That's why I can't get too troubled about Jayson Blair. The
Times has it coming, for a thousand more serious reasons that haven't ever
bothered its editors or its publisher.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2003 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
