Jayson Blair speaks
: Andrew Kirtzman of WCBS TV in New York (and formerly of the NY Daily News) gets an interview with Jayson Blair following the resignations of Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd at the New York Times. Kirtzman did a good job; he’s tough on Blair and the station gave him time to let it roll. Excerpts:
Blair: I’m sorry and I never meant to hurt anyone…
Kirtzman: Why did you do it?
Blair: It’s a complicated human tragedy and that’s the part that’s been lost in all this talk about race and the New York Times.
Kirtzman: What is the human tragedy?
Blair: Like I said before, it’s very complicated… It’ has to do with my own weaknesses, my struggles with substance abuse, my own struggles with mental illness…
Blair: [I] deferred my own wants for what journalism professors wanted… I lost my compass….
Kirtzman: [Asks about the anger of black Times reporters]
Blair: I made plenty of mistakes. I don’t think it’s my responsibility, though, that other people made this a story about racial preference….
Blair: I have no animosity toward Gerarld and Howell. Neither of them helped me more than they helped any other reporter and neither of them harmed me. People have a lot of different agendas in this situation and I feel that some people used my mistakes and deceptions… to attack other people…
Blair: I said a lot of things since this started that I wish I could have taken back… Some of my comments with the New York Observer were cruel and I thought were hurtful… I should have waited to have some time to reflect before I talked…
Blair: I certainly understand that I played a significant role in the problems the Times is having right now… I would hope that the media would give them an opportunity to take care of [this] inside the family…
Kirtzman: [Asks about his book proposal with the “incendiary title” Burning Down My Master’s House]. [Some people will say…] you screwed over the New York Times. You lied in stories. You caused the meltdown of a great institution. You caused the editor to leave…. Now you’re cashing in… This guy’s bad news. Are you an opportunist?…
Blair: I’m truly sorry for my actions and what they’ve done… I was in a cycle of self-destruction that… I never intended to hurt anyone else…
It’s shocking and downright frightening that one person could bring down the leades of the leading newspaper in America. Of course, Blair didn’t do it himself, as I say below: Raines and Boyd contributed to their own downfalls and the newsroom pushed them down that hill. But whether you like and respect Raines or don’t it’s still sobering and troubling that one lying sack of steaming shit — and, yes, that’s just what he is; he is worse than the worst of Worldcom or Enron or Anderson because he betrayed the sacred trust of all the people — it’s still scary that this one guy could cause such a fall from such a height.
For all the whooping over the fall of Raines, I fear that this is going to be very bad for the news business for it is going to make news safer and more boring and thus less compelling and thus less read.
Jayson Blair did far more than bring down the House of Howell. He had an impact on the news business that we cannot even begin to measure.
: Roger L. Simon started a game: If you ran the Times, whom would you hire for the op-ed page? He starts the bidding with Hitch, who seems to be the leader at the clubhouse turn.
: Farai Chideya at AlterNet says of the news business:
Unfortunately, the business right now resembles a herd of sheep. Many editors assign pieces more to impress their fellow editors than to serve the needs of the public. When I read the pile-on of attack pieces about the New York Times, I hear a distant baaa.
