RALEIGH — By now, you’ve no doubt heard of the revolting case of Jayson Blair, a young New York Times reporter whose inventions, exaggerations, and plagiarism led to his downfall and to a surge of embarrassing revelations about one of the world’s most powerful newspapers.
As detailed in a Newsweek cover story out this week, Blair had attracted controversy and doubt in every journalistic post he had ever held, not just in the big leagues but even as a student journalist. But he kept getting the next job, the next promotion. After dozens of corrections of his stories in the Times, and an egregious case of plagiarism last month, Blair resigned in disgrace and, later, admitted to personal problems such as drug and alcohol abuse.
If this was a story simply of a young, ambitious journalist’s ethical corner-cutting and eventual downfall, it would be of interest mainly to other journalists, and at best a national story for a day or two. What has led to a weeks-long national conversation is that Blair, a young black man, appears to have benefitted from affirmative action programs in his rapid descent to the Times. Defenders of diversity programs have risen to the defense and accused affirmative action’s critics of seizing a chance to unfairly impugn its value.
After all, they point out, other outrageous examples of journalistic excess and fabrication in recent years have involved whites. For example, former New Republic writer Stephen Glass is back in the news with a new “fictional” account of his career of wildly exaggerated and largely invented articles for TNR and other publications. Surely, affirmation action can’t be blamed for the Blair case when similar things are going on elsewhere with no racial overtones?
With respect, I think folks making this argument are simply missing the point. Yes, there are unethical people, young (like Glass and Blair) and old (like the former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle), who are drawn to the notoriety and sense of power in journalism. Their willingness to cheat often arises from feelings of inferiority, from fears that they can’t “play with the big boys” without pumping up their prose with tall tales and too-perfect quotes.
I’ll embarrass myself a little here by recounting the very tiny role I had in the Stephen Glass fiasco. Back in 1995, I was finishing up a year-long stint as a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, writing a book and a column for the think tank’s magazine, Policy Review. One of my colleagues there was, you guessed it, Glass. One day, he walked from his office next door to mine for a chat. He had just been given a chance to fill a reporter/researcher position at The New Republic, one similar to a post I had filled there a few years before.
Glass was concerned that he wouldn’t be up to the job, that he might not perform up to standard in such a high-pressure journalistic environment. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, “I think you’ll fit right in” (or something like that, I won’t pretend to have taken notes). He seemed reassured and took the job later that week.
D’oh!
The point here is that, if I had been paying closer attention or knew him better or thought it was my place to do so, I might have taken his insecurity more seriously. Of course, I wasn’t his editor. When Stephen Glass’ misrepresentations were identifed at TNR, he was canned. The problem there was that he got away for so long without being caught.
The Blair case is radically different. He didn’t consistently fool his colleagues or his editors. There was a pattern of problems in his writing, and he was retained despite them being known, at least in part, to the higher-ups. That’s what the critics are taking note of — not that Blair is black and thus his ethical problems were race-derived in some way (a ridiculous suggestion) but that he was treated differently, tolerated and enabled, because diversity-driven editors were unwilling to give up on him.
Serious and well-meaning advocates of affirmative action should be among the most angry at the Times for failing to hold Blair to the same high standards to which his white colleagues were held. If defined as an attempt to improve newsroom diversity through aggressive recruitment efforts, affirmation action is actually a defensible practice, perhaps even a journalistic necessity.
But it should not, and need not, ever devolve into creating separate systems of judgment and accountability for white and non-white. That’s what critics of racial preferences are complaining about in this case, and in the case of university admissions practices now being adjudicated at the U.S. Supreme Court. These critics are right on both.
A housekeeping item: you’ll find a link on Monday’s Carolina Journal Online to a response to a recent column of mine on Mike Easley’s tax policies and their impact on North Carolina’s economy. The piece is by Dan Gerlach, the governor’s fiscal policy advisor, and ran in Sunday’s Charlotte Observer. Thought I would just let it speak for itself just now, and respond in my next Daily Journal. So for the next round in the Hood v. Gerlach (featherweight division) bout, tune in tomorrow.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.