This week I rise to the defense of the New York Times, and especially its two senior editors, Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd. I recognize that in some forums, any defense of the Gray Lady is about as welcome as a shadow on a lung X-ray. Nevertheless, right now, many on the right are using l’affair Jayson Blair as a stick for beating one of the great dead horses of the American right: affirmative action.
First, before some among you become apoplectic, let me say unequivocally as a journalist that Jayson Blair’s misdeeds – the nicest word I can use for years of lies, deceit and fabrication – were grounds for immediate termination. Blair is the reporter’s version of a Rogue Trader. If a serial killer had a journalistic equivalent, Blair would be it – he literally murdered tens of stories, sources, interviewees, subjects, the trust of his colleagues, the reputation of one of America’s great newspapers and, worse, the reputation of print journalism itself. Raines was right to have fired him, and was right to have reported candidly on the episode, which appeared in Sunday’s New York Times.
There is much criticism to go around here, but not, as my conservative friends would have it, for ideological reasons. Raines and Boyd may be guilty of negligent management – the work environment at the Times may bear too much of Raines’ and Boyd’s personal stamp, vertical lines of communication between reporters and editors need to be improved and, most importantly, lateral lines of chit-chat between editors needs dramatic improvement.
As Sunday’s article noted, all of the answers about Jayson Blair were “in the building,” only no one put it together. These things were forthrightly addressed in an editor-reporter tell-all convened this week. Based on reports, nothing was held back, least of all Raines’ acknowledgement that mistakes were made. “I was guilty of a failure of vigilance,” the executive editor noted, “since I sit in this chair where the buck stops, I should have prevented.”
(It’s a funny thing. As Raines and Boyd pronounced their mea culpas, I kept thinking about Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling from Enron; Bernie Ebbers from WorldCom; Sam Waksal from Imclone and everybody else whose own “misdeeds” robbed tends of thousands of their savings and retirements. I never heard any of these guys say the words “I was” and the word “guilty” in the same sentence.)
To my friends on the right who are using the Blair episode as an ideological dartboard for your hatred of affirmative action, I say this – you are hypocrites! For years, you have leveled the charge of “reverse racism” at affirmative action, claiming that by advancing minorities and women into positions of power, liberals were, as President Bush so misleadingly put it, perpetuating “the bigotry of soft expectations.” The result, you claimed, was that women and minorities so advanced were in reality being treated unfairly, since they weren’t “really” qualified for the positions that, for the first time in American history, finally became open to them.
That’s the argument, isn’t it? So what do you do? When a black man or woman fails, or proves morally delinquent, you stigmatize every woman and every minority by claiming, “See, it’s what we’ve been saying all along – “they” aren’t really qualified; making room at the top for “them” just gets you into trouble. Affirmative action is a failure.”
Here’s another funny thing. Most of the guys who went down in last spring’s corporate scandals were white men. I didn’t hear a chorus of wailing from the right that white men have “failed” or were being “advanced too soon.” I didn’t hear about that either when the Boston Globe canned Mike Barnicle for allegedly plagiarizing, or when the late conservative historian Stephen Ambrose was accused of the same thing, or when the two other liberal historians were accused of inaccurate facts or “borrowing” from other sources in recent books. No, for them, it’s just a character defect, or an individual moral failing or whatever. But change the skin color or gender of the miscreant, and whoa! Have we got a constitutional crisis, or what?
Sorry, all you Gray Lady haters, but the bottom line is that Raines did right to hire this kid. And he’s doing right to keep hiring kids like this. It’s too bad that this one didn’t work out, worse yet that he caused so much damage.
But you know, a lot of kids who show early promise don’t work out. Should we stop having kids?
Or maybe, since my right-wing friends would like to throw out the “baby” of equal opportunity with the “bathwater” of one bad kid’s mistakes, we ought to stop having babies.
I don’t think so.
