Blair Defiant in First Full-Scale Interview
Disgraced former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair gave his first full-scale interview to the New York Observer, appearing more defiant than contrite, freely offering his opinions of his former bosses and claiming that “both racial preferences and racism played a role (in his Times career). And I would argue that they didn’t balance each other out. Racism had much more of an impact.”
The article said that Blair is now going to therapy three times a week, and that he characterized himself as a “former total cokehead.”
He denied that managing editor Gerald Boyd was his mentor, saying Boyd was actually his “antagonist.” And he said top editor Howell Raines didn’t treat Blair as a favorite: “‘Generally, I felt like Howell did what he had to do,’ Mr. Blair said. ‘I feel bad for the situation he’s in. But I think a lot of it is by his own hand. He is a good man. He is well-intentioned. ‘Maybe it’ll make him a little mature,’ he said. He broke out into laughter, stomping his foot on the ground. ‘That’s coming from me!’
“. . . ‘I don’t understand why I am the bumbling affirmative-action hire when [plagiarizing, white former New Republic writer] Stephen Glass is this brilliant whiz kid, when from my perspective — and I know I shouldn’t be saying this — I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism,’ he said. ‘He [Glass] is so brilliant, and yet somehow I’m an affirmative-action hire. They’re all so smart, but I was sitting right under their nose fooling them.’ Mr. Blair continued: ‘If they’re all so brilliant and I’m such an affirmative-action hire, how come they didn’t catch me?’ “
A companion piece discusses Blair’s effort to sell a book about his implosion. And the American Journalism Review traces Blair’s college years at the University of Maryland.
Times Forms What-Went-Wrong Committee
The New York Times late today issued a list of members of the “Siegal Committee,” whose “charge is to determine when, where, how and why our newsroom’s culture, organizational processes and actions led to a failure of our journalism.” Among the Times staffers of color on the committee are Diane Cardwell, Mia Navarro, David Chen, Steve Holmes and Sheila Rule.
“Using these findings, and our research into other organizations’ best practices, the committee will make specific recommendations to the newspaper’s senior leadership – Arthur [Ochs Sulzberger, publisher], Janet [L. Robinson, president and general manager], Gail [Collins, editorial page editor], Howell [Raines, executive editor] and Gerald [M. Boyd, managing editor] — concerning improvements necessary to assure the quality and integrity of the newsroom’s methods of communication, collaboration and supervision. We will also deliver a report to the full news staff of The Times,” wrote Allan M. Siegal, the assistant managing editor who is chairing the committee.
Members are:
Jill Abramson, Washington bureau chief; Diane Cardwell, metro reporter; David Chen, metro reporter; Suzanne Daley, education editor; Jeff Gerth, Washington correspondent; Jonathan Glater, Business Day reporter; Steve Holmes, Washington editor/correspondent; Dana Jennings, deputy editor, City section; Glenn Kramon, business/financial editor; Jon Landman, metro editor; Alison Mitchell, deputy national editor; Gretchen Morgenson, Business Day columnist; Mia Navarro, metro reporter; Sheila Rule, senior editor, recruiting; Richard Sandomir, reporter, sports; Lew Serviss, metro copy desk (slot); Nancy Sharkey, staff development editor; Dennis Stern, v.p., human resources; Jodi Wilgoren, Chicago correspondent; Greg Winter, Business Day reporter.
And from outside The Times (list still in formation):
Louis D. Boccardi, president and CEO, AP (about to retire); Joann Byrd, editorial page editor, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (about to retire), and ex-ombudsman, Washington Post.
Rapporteur and coordinator: Fred Andrews, former senior editor for development at the Times.
Backlash from Janet Cooke Scandal Recalled
“There was a time back in 1982 when I seriously considered homicide, did I tell you?” writes former Washington Post reporter Neil Henry, who now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.
Making reference to the fabrication scandal at the Post involving Janet Cooke, who is also black, Henry writes in an open letter to former students:
“This is what happened: A white editor pulled me aside one day several months after Janet Cooke’s firing and asked me if a feature story I had written was true. It took me a minute to figure out what the devil the guy was driving at, and when I did I felt myself about ready to explode. I really came this close to grabbing him around his flabby throat and banging his head against the wall. But I didn’t. All I could do was take a deep breath, choke back the rage, and answer that yes indeed, I had been to an illegal cockfight in rural Maryland. I told him I’d spent days digging into the story, was proud that I had gotten it, and that the article was quite true in every vivid detail. I swallowed the hostility, in other words, and the story ran on the front page.”
Henry’s recollection in the Chronicle of Higher Education puts into perspective why so many of today’s black journalists become anxious when commentators blithely tie the Jayson Blair scandal to diversity efforts.
N.Y. Times Not Alone in Ignoring Warning Signs
The New York Times shares with other successful businesses its failure to heed warning signs of trouble with Jayson Blair, Sydney Finkelstein, a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and the author of the forthcoming book “Why Smart Executives Fail,” wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal.
“I believe that it’s fundamentally not about incompetence, or bad communications, or a diversity program that got out of hand. The key is in the very prestige that these companies enjoy.
“The Times is internationally respected by outsiders, and revered by insiders. It considers itself not just America’s newspaper of record, but maybe even the best news organization on the planet. When your aspiration is to be not just great but the best, it’s easy to believe that your young reporter has actually scooped everyone else on the Washington sniper story, or the Jessica Lynch story. Why question someone who is simply fulfilling the organization’s highest self-image? Jayson Blair appeared to be doing the kind of reporting that was expected of him.
“It’s the same at many other blue-chip companies: Leaders choose not to sweat the small stuff because they’ve been so successful for so long, they disregard warnings that would trouble a less confident group. The willingness to challenge the status quo and confront dominant but dangerous assumptions are the hallmarks of thriving companies. When these qualities are absent, even smart executives fail,” Finkelstein wrote.
Editors Document Readers’ Distrust of Newspapers
Associated Press Managing Editors, working with 16 newspapers across the country, says that last week it asked 3,000 readers “to comment on a disturbing question raised by The New York Times Jayson Blair case:
“Why would readers and sources fail to alert a newspaper to reporting they recognize as clearly inaccurate?
“Those who said they failed to report errors had a variety of explanations: They doubted newspapers cared about mistakes or would listen to them. Navigating a newspaper’s corrections system would take too much time. The error was so obvious that surely someone at the newspaper would correct it. They believed inaccuracies were intentional in journalism that glosses over the fine points and hypes storytelling.
“APME gathered the reader comments through new e-mail reader advisory networks developed as part of the organization’s National Credibility Roundtables Project.”
SPJ: Don’t Link Blair With Diversity Programs
“The Society of Professional Journalists, the nation’s largest organization of journalists, takes issue with those media critics who link affirmative action and diversity programs to the journalistic failures of Jayson Blair, the former reporter for The New York Times who resigned over charges of plagiarism and lying in his stories,” SPJ says in a news release.
“. . . ‘A healthy, constructive discussion on this matter would move beyond simplistic and wrong assertions,’ [SPJ President Robert] Leger said. ‘It would instead address what news organizations can do to ensure they have safeguards in place to protect themselves, our work and the public from people who would act in ways that undermine the fragile public trust we have. A person’s color or gender has nothing to do with that and should not in the Jayson Blair case.'”
Toles cartoon
Bill Mitchell cartoon
Two U.S. Journalists of Color Win Niemans
Jodi Rave, Native American beat reporter for Nebraska’s Lincoln Journal Star, and Ju-Don Marshall Roberts, an editor with washingtonpost.com, are among the 13 U.S. journalists named to the 66th class of Nieman Fellows at Harvard University.
Rave, who is Native American, plans to study “legal matters affecting Native peoples and the relationship between local, state, tribal and federal governments, particularly as these relationships pertain to minority rights, revenue generation and political participation,” the announcement said.
Roberts, who is African American, plans to study “how the Internet is transforming the way people live, work and communicate, and the lessons from the evolution of radio and television that apply to the development of the Internet.”
The 12 international journalists chosen include Jie Lin, who is Asian; Mauricio Lloredea and Carina Novarese, both Hispanic; and Lizeka Mda, Declan Okpalaeke and Geoff Nyarota, who are black Africans, curator Robert Giles told Journal-isms.
Nyarota, former editor of Zimbabwe’s only independent daily newspaper, the Daily News, is the 2003 National Association of Black Journalists’ Percy Qoboza award winner. The award honors the work of a foreign journalist who has overcome serious obstacles.
Takahama, Tung Selected for Arts Fellowships
Valerie Takahama, staff writer at California’s Orange County Register, and Lily Tung, segment producer and writer at KRON-TV San Francisco, are among seven journalists selected for National Arts Journalism Program research fellowships at Columbia University for the 2003-04 academic year.
“In addition to pursuing coursework and other activities at Columbia, the fellows will participate jointly in a research project designed to inform news organizations, arts institutions and philanthropic organizations about important trends in the current U.S. artistic and journalistic environment. The findings will be published in late 2004 in an in-depth NAJP report, Reporting the Arts II, following up on the program’s groundbreaking 1999 study, Reporting the Arts, the first comprehensive national assessment of how the arts are covered by the news media across America,” the announcement said.
Morial’s Selection Means Move for Anchor Wife
Last week’s selection of former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial as president of the National Urban League means that his wife, anchor-reporter Michelle Miller, will be leaving New Orleans with the family for New York.
Miller, who until recently was president of the New Orleans Association of Black Journalists, is anchor of the 5 a.m. newscast on WWL-TV, where she is also a reporter who does a segment on teenagers for the Thursday 5 p.m. news. She married Morial in September 1999, while he was mayor.
Miller has filed as a candidate for vice president/broadcast of the National Association of Black Journalists, along with Barbara Ciara, managing editor at WTKR-TV in Norfolk, Va., and Kathy Times, investigative reporter at WVTM-TV in Birmingham, Ala., but it was not clear where Miller would be working next. An internal e-mail at WWL-TV congratulated Miller and said she would probably be at the station until the end of the summer while the family finds a house in New York.
“Morial will move with his wife, local television reporter Michelle Miller, and his one-year-old son, Mason, to New York, where the national organization is based, [Charles] Hamilton [Jr., chairman of the Urban League’s search committee] said. He will travel frequently to the group’s Washington, D.C., office, as well as to 100 affiliates in other parts of the country,” said the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Concentration of Spanish Media Opposed
“As the Federal Communications Commission takes longer than expected to approve Univision Communications Inc.’s acquisition of radio group Hispanic Broadcasting Corp., opposition to the union of the country’s dominant Spanish-language media groups has been mounting steadily among Democrats,” writes Eduardo Porter in the Wall Street Journal.
“Last week, eight members of Congress, including Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California, filed a letter with FCC Chairman Michael Powell arguing that the transaction — which would consolidate 70% of the Spanish media market in the biggest cities in the country — would make it more difficult for independent Hispanic media companies to compete.
“The week before, two other Democrats, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, fired off letters to the FCC warning that the deal would produce excessive concentration in Spanish-language media.
“The burst of opposition to the stock deal, which was valued at $3.5 billion when it was announced last year, has been nurtured by the National Hispanic Policy Institute, a nonprofit group led by a Democratic New York state senator, Efrain Gonzalez“.
FCC Commissioner Wants Tougher Scrutiny
Federal Communications commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said broadcasters should face tougher federal scrutiny on how their purchases of outlets such as newspapers and TV stations will serve the public interest, Media Week reports.
“The comments by Adelstein, a member of the FCC’s Democratic minority, come as the agency considers relaxing a broad range of regulations that inhibit one owner’s purchase of multiple TV stations in a locality, and that generally forbid broadcasters from buying a local daily newspaper. The agency is considering allowing an owner to hold as many as three TV stations in the largest cities, and to own both dailies and broadcast stations in many cities.
“Adelstein called the FCC’s proposed rules relaxation ‘an extreme proposal’ but said he saw nothing standing in the way of a June 2 vote set by the FCC’s Republican chairman, Michael Powell,” Media Week said.
Free Press “Stereotyping” Surprises Readers
“A front-page photograph of a young black man holding a handgun published with a May 10 article about the basketball rivalry between Detroit and Philadelphia angered some Free Press readers,” writes public editor John X. Miller in the Detroit Free Press.
” ‘At a glance, it was another African-American male with a pistol. I didn’t read the article at first,’ said Derek Forney of Oak Park. ‘But people who glance at it, at a newsstand or gas station, and read the caption saying “no fear,” it wasn’t appropriate. I didn’t understand what the gun had to do with it.’
“He was one of about 40 people who called or e-mailed to complain about that front-page photo and about stereotyping,” Miller wrote. “Other photos published with the article — a Latino 76ers fan whose arms were covered in tattoos and a front-page photo of a white man and woman dressed in colonial costumes, smiling and talking on the street — were called stereotypical as well.”
But, said Miller, “I asked those who complained if stereotyping was a problem or a pattern they see with the Free Press. Most said it was not. Two people said the opposite was true, and that’s what made that Saturday photograph such a surprise in the first place.”
Native Journalists Offering “Eco-Tour”
The Native American Journalists Association plans to offer an eco-tour of three Indian Nations in Wisconsin June 17-18 preceding its national conference in Oneida, the association announces.
“Native and non-Native journalists will travel by bus to the Forest County Potawatomi, Sokaogon Chippewa Community (Mole Lake), and the Menominee Reservations. Enroute to each reservation, elders will place current environmental issues in cultural context.
“Upon arrival in each community tribal resource managers will discuss environmental issues, such as air and water quality, sustainable development, and land conservation. Other topics will include genetically modified rice, sulfide mining, and treaty rights.
“Post-dinner break-out discussions between journalists and environmental experts are planned for Keshena on the Menominee Reservation, where the tour will overnight. Participants will return to Oneida in time for the NAJA conference opening. Cost for the two-day tour, which includes transportation, two breakfasts, two lunches (including a traditional feast), one dinner, and one-night’s lodging, is $150.00 and is open to all journalists. Fellowships are available, see www.naja.com for applications,” says the news release.
Browne of NBC Miami Named COO of Telemundo
Donald Browne, president and general manager of NBC6/WTVJ in Miami, was named chief operating officer of Telemundo, the NBC-owned Hispanic TV network, replacing Alan Sokol, who resigned, Media Week reports.
“Prior to joining WTVJ in 1993, Browne was executive vp of NBC News and was involved in the creation of the network’s news magazine, Dateline. His long news career began at CBS News in 1967.
“Browne is one of NBC’s top station operators and was a major proponent of NBC’s acquisition of Telemundo.
“In his new role, Browne will oversee the operations and news divisions of the 15 owned-and-operated Telemundo stations, as well as mun2, reporting to Jim McNamara, president and CEO of Telemundo. The Sports divisions will continue to report to McNamara.”
Whitfield, Choi Among CNN “Morning” Tryouts
“CNN’s ‘American Morning’ host Bill Hemmer jokingly has compared his constant rotation of female co-hosts to “The Bachelor.” Since Paula Zahn left the show a month ago to host a new prime time program for the network, CNN has tried out a number of anchors in the coveted spot,” reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Among the guest hosts:
“Fredricka Whitfield: Anchors the weekend newscasts CNN Saturday and CNN Sunday. Whitfield also works as a correspondent for the network, reporting on breaking news events worldwide.
“Sophia Choi: A prime time news anchor for CNN Headline News. Before joining CNN, Choi co-hosted CBS 2 Morning Show at CBS Los Angeles affiliate KCBS-TV.”
First Woman Publisher for Cincinnati Paper
Margaret E. Buchanan has been named publisher of The Cincinnati Enquirer, becoming the first woman to have the job in the newspaper’s 162-year history, the Associated Press reports.
“The newspaper’s parent, Gannett Co. Inc., announced the hiring in Wednesday’s editions. Buchanan also will be the Enquirer’s president.
“She succeeds Harry Whipple, the Enquirer’s president and publisher since January 1992. Whipple, 55, has retired.”
No Men in Women’s Locker Rooms
“There is one area that remains largely out of bounds to me and my colleagues of both sexes: the women’s locker room. I cannot interview most women athletes in their lair, even though women sportswriters were let into the locker rooms of male athletes a long time ago,” writes Gerald Eskenazi in the Los Angeles Times.
“Two notable women’s sports exceptions are the WNBA, which allows invasions by writers of both sexes before and after basketball games, and the WUSA, the soccer league. The U.S. Open is the only event on the tennis tour that allows men into women’s locker rooms. On the women’s golf tour, only its Open championship allows men and women to enter even an area adjacent to the locker room.
“What’s the big deal about not being able to get into all women’s locker rooms? In my 40-plus years of interviewing athletes, the most candid exchanges took place in a locker room milieu. The reader has benefited from that access,” Eskenazi writes, listing some of those exchanges.
