A young employee with more ambition than talent is fast-tracked up the ladder for no reason other than the colour of his skin. Before long, the responsibilities weigh so heavy on his under-qualified shoulders that his inevitable fall brings the entire organisation to the brink of crisis.
Such is the light in which many here have cast the astonishing saga of Jayson Blair, the 27 year-old New York Times reporter recently exposed as a journalistic fraud in a revelation that undermined the standing of one of the world’s most venerated newspapers and led to the resignation of Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, the paper’s executive editor and managing editor respectively.
To conservative pundits – and some of the not-so-conservative variety – the scandal has come to epitomise the dangers of affirmative action in the newsroom: ethnic diversity purchased at the expense of journalistic standards. Were it not for his bosses’ desperation to attract and retain minority staff, the argument goes, Blair’s rapid advancement through the ranks – despite warning after well-documented warning – would have been inconceivable.
It’s a plausible theory, particularly given the paper’s long-standing commitment to racial equality. As far back as the 1950’s, The Sulzberger family, publishers of The Times since 1896, voiced editorial support for the civil rights movement, aware that thousands of readers – particularly in the segregationist South – would cancel their subscriptions as a result. When Arthur Sulzberger Jr. succeeded his father as publisher of The Times in 1992, he singled out diversity as one of the paper’s key objectives, and promoted to prominent positions a number of black staffers, including Boyd – the first black editor to appear on the masthead.
Despite Sulzberger’s efforts, however, racial minorities make up only around 17 percent of The Times newsroom (versus a national minority population of over 30 percent) and the vast majority of top positions still belong to white males – a fact not lost on Raines, himself a champion of minority interests since his youth, whose history of the American civil rights movement, ‘My Soul is Rested,” has become required reading for students of the subject.
In a closed-door staff meeting convened by Sulzberger shortly after the Blair scandal broke, Raines accepted responsibility for a ‘failure of vigilance,” and fielded a volley of hostile questions. Staff morale had deteriorated significantly during Raines’s twenty-month tenure at the newsroom’s helm – reportedly owing to the executive editor’s inaccessibility, arrogance and the sort of tacit favouritism exemplified in his erstwhile fondness for Blair.
According to The Times’ own report on the meeting, Raines anticipated the question as to whether Blair’s race was a factor even before it was asked:
‘I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities,” he said. ‘Does that mean I personally favoured Jayson? Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many— When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.”
Ultimately, the contrition displayed by Raines, the manager, was not sufficient to prevent his downfall. But one detects in his soul-searching mea culpa an implication of which Raines, the newsman, was likely only too aware: by highlighting the issue of Blair’s race, he painted a picture of himself as a competent editor temporarily blinded by his own noble intentions.
Perhaps this is the way in which Raines will be remembered. But by deflecting some of his own guilt, wittingly or not, onto the principle of newsroom diversity, one has a right to ask whether Raines has not done a disservice to the ideals for which he purports to stand.
Forced onto the defensive, proponents of affirmative action have been quick to point to the long list of white journalists exposed as plagiarists and fabulists in recent years. Race was clearly not a factor in advancing these reporters’ careers. Neither did it make them more willing or able to pull one over on their editors.
One high-profile white fabulist, Stephen Glass, managed an extended run of tall stories at the New Republic in the late nineties, even substantiating his non-existent sources with fake websites and phone numbers. When finally exposed, he applied his talents, appropriately enough, to the field of fiction.
On the very same night that The Times broke the Blair story, Glass appeared on 60 Minutes to publicise his new semi-autobiographical novel, ‘The Fabulist.” His exploits are also soon to grace the big screen under a title (Shattered Glass) that would make any tabloid sub-editor proud. It’s safe to assume that neither the book nor the movie makes an issue of Glass’s skin colour.
According to at least one Times reporter, Pulitzer Prize-winner Jim Dwyer, Blair’s race was similarly incidental to his journalistic success. ‘Jayson had talent,” Dwyer told Salon magazine. ‘He had drive. Some people found him charming. That ought to carry you somewhere in this world. It carried him further than his skin colour did, in my opinion.”
For his part, Jayson Blair vehemently rejects the notion that his race was an advantage in the newsroom. On the contrary, in an interview with The New York Observer, he claims that being black at The Times hurt him more than it helped him, insisting that for every senior manager working to advance African-American reporters, there are scores of ‘white junior managers who resent that and don’t.”
‘I don’t understand why I am the bumbling affirmative-action hire,” says Blair, ‘when Stephen Glass is this brilliant whiz kid, when from my perspective – and I know I shouldn’t be saying this – I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism.”
One can take Blair’s point, if not his word. That he perpetrated a fraud on The Times and its readers has less to do with affirmative action than with one man’s dishonesty. That he managed to get away it for so long has less to do with his editors’ white guilt than with their ineptitude.
Tim Spira is The Media’s correspondent in New York.