Jayson Blair, a disgraced New York Times journalist whose trail of fabricated stories and plagiarism led to the resignation of the newspaper’s top two editors, has struck a new blow against his former employer with a tell-all book due to be published next week.
In the book, Burning Down my Master’s House, Blair admits the long running deception of his editors and pretending to report from places he had never visited and interview people he had never spoken to. The New York Times eventually found errors and fabrications in three dozen of his reports.
”I lied and I lied, and then I lied some more,” Blair writes in the book, according to a copy acquired early and reviewed by the New York Times. ”I lied about where I had been, I lied about where I had found information, I lied about how I wrote the story.”
He says he spent much of his working days in a haze of alcohol and cocaine, which fuelled his ”best writing”, and contemplated hanging himself with his own belt the night before he resigned.
But he also uses the book to attack the New York Times, America’s most venerated newspaper, which he describes as ”a cutthroat culture that leaves no rival standing”, and writes critically of some of his former colleagues.
The discovery of his invented stories provoked one of the worst crises in the newspaper’s history, and the resignation of its executive editor, Howell Raines, and managing editor, Gerald Boyd, last June.
Raines’ successor, Bill Keller, and his two managing editors circulated an e-mail among the staff, bracing them for the book’s publication. ”The author is an admitted fabricator,” Keller wrote. ”The book pretends to be a mea culpa but ends up spewing imaginary blame in all directions.”
In the book, Blair describes his long term struggle with alcoholism, recounting how at college, ”I would start my mornings with a glass of scotch … and end my day with a glass by my side, sitting in bed, still drinking”, according to an extract printed in the New York Daily News.
He also writes about his near daily and costly drug use. ”I was not ready to give up cocaine though,” he says. ”After all, some of my best stories were inspired by drug-fuelled writing.”
He decided not to commit suicide because he realised that despite his public shaming, his life was beginning to improve. He had been sober for a year and had fallen in love.
Read an interview and extracts from Jayson Blair’s book next Saturday – Guardian Unlimited Â