In a racially charged book proposal titled ”Burning Down My Master’s House,” disgraced former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair likens himself to Lee Boyd Malvo, the alleged triggerman in some of the D.C.-area sniper murders, and hurls unsubstantiated charges of racism at the paper he calls ”my tormentor, my other drug, my slavemaster,” according to a report by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post.
In the book proposal, read to the Washington Post by a source not connected to Blair, the 27-year-old says of Malvo: ”The moment I began to see parallels between his life and mine was the moment things began falling apart.” He writes of ”how the frustrations of black men in this world can explode, crescendo into a huge rage that can manifest itself in some odd and sometimes unclear ways.”
Blair, who grew up in a middle-class family, describes himself as someone told he’d never succeed ”by everyone from his white second-grade teacher to his editor at the Times, who rose from the fields and got a place in the master’s house and then burned it down the only way he knew how,” according to the Post.
Blair, who attended college but never graduated, describes the Times as a ”snobbish place” with hallways filled with Ivy Leaguers.
He also promises to reveal the Times’ ”darkest secrets,” which he says involve drug parties and one editor’s affair with an intern.
Tired of being a reporter after four years, Blair said that’s when he decided to get back at the Times.
”Each one I got away with felt like a ‘[expletive] you’ to an institution that I had long ago lost any love for,” he said, according to the Post.
Blair resigned May 1 after fabricating or plagiarizing at least 36 stories.
Some literary agents say the proposed book could bring the ex-reporter a six-figure advance.
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