A troubled reporter falls into his own empty space
By MARY JO MELONE
Published May 15, 2003
When I was a college senior, 30 years ago, I interned at the New York Times. Mostly I ran copy from reporters to editors or from editors to the pressroom. Now and then, I got to write stories. Glory be, what a thrill it was. And what a terror.
Jayson Blair, the young reporter whose trail of deceit has rocked the nation's most powerful newspaper, must have been like that, only a million times worse. Afraid. Always afraid. Of the competition. Of his reflection. Of the locked doors he had to knock on, and the strangers he had to persuade to talk to him. And of those people he had to please at his office, the editors, who could make or break him.
I had one who sent me to cover a school strike. I wrote my story and misspelled the name of a principal. The day the story was published, the editor caught up with me at the row of metal desks that made up the command center of the newsroom, the metro desk, where every local editor of significance sat. In a voice I can still hear, he thundered that I was never to do that again. I wanted the floor to open and swallow me. It did not. I was naked, there before the metro desk.
Some time later, discouraged by my prospects at the paper, and at life, I left the Times. But I never gave up on journalism. I finally found a place where I fit, at this newspaper. I'm an old hand now. Too old for the Scotch and the cigarettes that once kept my energy and ideas flowing, and did the same for Blair. However, I still gobble Cheez Doodles, Blair's favorite junk food, when I feel utterly empty inside, devoid of a single decent idea. Oddly, once I eat, I can write.
I think many journalists have these daily collisions with their empty spaces, where their doubts reside. When you write with the regularity of the sweep hands of a clock, it's hard to delight sentence after sentence.
Most writers come to terms with this by accepting that on the days they don't delight, dull will have to do, because the space must be filled. Tomorrow, they reckon, is another day. But Blair, ever ambitious, had his own rules. When he wasn't stealing from other papers, he was making it up - a feat that would seem much harder than putting together a story from the facts collected in a notebook.
I am not so surprised that Blair got away with his deceit, and his dismal record for errors, for as long as he did. He was the beneficiary of favoritism born of his race - he is African-American - and the desire of his largely white, diversity-minded bosses that he succeed.
There is nothing terrible in acknowledging this. Like all professions, journalism has its way of playing favorites. Some people get chances that others don't. They get exciting assignments out of town or more time to finish a special project.
Jayson Blair's story is not all that different from that of Mike Barnicle, the white columnist fired from the Boston Globe for plagiarism, who had long been the beneficiary of a kind of Irish good-ol'-boyism - a network so vast that he landed on his feet at the New York Daily News. Blair will not be so lucky.
People who are only readers of newspapers think this is a magical business. Jayson Blair pulled the curtain back. Part of what has been revealed here, part of what went wrong, was in the relationship Blair had with his editors.
A young reporter is desperate to please editors. He is by definition hungry to hear that his prose has grace and glimmer, that his reporting is smart and insightful. He would do anything to make his boss happy. To a kid handicapped by his lack of scruples, making up or stealing the work would qualify as anything.
And the editor almost asks to be fooled. Editors too often praise literary-like prose rather than the meat and potatoes of fact. It's so, well, meat and potatoes.
The pressure on reporters just starting out to be dazzling stylists is enormous. Jayson Blair felt that pressure. He followed his twisted instincts. His editors relied on their misplaced faith. You know the rest of the story.
