Troubled Times

I had just had one of my most enjoyable Q&Es (Questions and Evasions) with Presidential Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, as one of the last exchanges of the daily White House news briefing.

I was approached by a nice looking young man. He had a really winning smile and such charm as would move a stone dog to wag his tail.

He expressed interest in my questions and Ari’s humorously ingenious evasions. He then asked if he could phone and interview me.

I replied that as a radio talk show host I have to face questions every night. So I gave him my phone number and asked him his name and for whom he worked.

“I’m Jayson Blair of the New York Times.”

Fortunately, Mr. Blair never followed up. Nor did he report interviewing me – when he had not – as he did so often in the course of four years of his continuous lying as a reporter for the Times.

If the New York Times is ever to be believed again, executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd – who for four years allowed this endless parade of Jayson Blair falsehoods into print and promoted and congratulated him – should be compelled to resign, just as Blair was. Otherwise the New York Times is an absolute skyscraper of irresponsibility.

I remember Raines and Boyd when they covered the White House.

Howell Raines was very pleasant, and he had what I thought was a good sense of humor. But, when he became the Times top editor, he launched his crusade of some six dozen news stories, features, op-eds and editorials against the Augusta, Georgia Golf Club’s males-only-membership. This crusade resulted in a protest by feminists, which was one of modern American history’s most ludicrous flops.

Now Raines’ affirmative action racial favoritism toward Blair the Serial Liar has evoked such understandable rage from other Times personnel that there is a reported work slow down – the first in Times history. This led publisher Arthur (“Pinch”) Salzburger Jr., to call an unprecedented meeting of all Times reporters and editors, in a nearby theater. And by way of compounding disaster, the Times closed this newsworthy meeting of a newspaper to all other newspapers and other media.

I also vividly recall managing editor Gerald Boyd at the White House. Two years ago he returned for the annual White House Christmas party for the media. Here he was enormously more courteous and congenial to me than when he was a White House correspondent.

At one White House briefing that Times correspondent Boyd and I both attended, I quoted Parade magazine’s report that a New York Times female reporter had been transferred from Washington to Cairo because she had been found to have covered Clinton Secretary of Defense Les Aspen – between the sheets.

So, I asked: “Does the White House know of any newspaper besides the New York Times that has its reporters covering presidential cabinet members by sleeping with them?”

After the briefing, Boyd approached and called me a rectal orifice (or street obscenity to that effect). I replied by asking Boyd if he was into rectal orifices – to which responsive inquiry I never received any answer.

But as I say, Boyd was most pleasant two years ago. Nonetheless, he and Raines ought really to resign for allowing the worst New York Times outrage since 1932, when the Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, also lied – repeatedly.

Duranty repeatedly denied that Stalin’s Red Army had starved several million Ukrainians to death.

Not only did the Times refuse to send back Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize – as the Washington Post did for their serial-lying Pulitzer-winner Janet Cooke, but the Times still has Walter Duranty’s framed photograph in their Pulitzer Hall of Fame.

And they still include Walter Duranty when they brag about their number of Pulitzers.