Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  Blair began his career at the Times working in the “cop shop,” the pressroom at New York City’s police headquarters. From very early on, Blair bragged of his relationship with senior editors at the Times, particularly Gerald Boyd. There were reasons to believe him: Many reporters were under the impression that Boyd took African American reporters under his wing. What’s more, Blair seemed to have an inside track to people’s personnel files, and he made frequent references to employee evaluations or private notes sent between editors, which he hinted he had gotten through his supposed connections.

  From the get-go, Blair’s performance was spotty. There was the time Blair was at a party when he was supposed to be covering a crime scene. He told friends he once passed out at Times headquarters and woke up there the next morning. He consumed copious amounts of Scotch, and he seemed to blow through money. He showed up to work in dirty, stained clothes. Charles Strum, his editor at the time, said later, “I told him that he needed to find a different way to nourish himself than drinking Scotch, smoking cigarettes, and buying Cheez Doodles from the vending machine.”

  “He always struck me as having really bad boundaries and being really immature,” says a Times reporter who first met Blair during those years and remained friendly with him throughout his time at the paper. “His biggest skill seemed to be office politics. You’d see his stories, and they never stood out. There was nothing really memorable in his writing.” But he was always eager for more assignments.

  That November, Blair was promoted to the position of intermediate reporter. Over the next four years, Blair furthered his reputation for being one of the paper’s most tireless gossips. He knew, or claimed to know, virtually everyone who worked in journalism. He was the type of voracious self-promoter who constantly bragged about his connections to editors at the Times and to reporters at other papers, and he made a particular point of discussing his supposed connections to Boyd. He made no secret about the fact that he was often an anonymous source for several of the city’s media columnists. He gravitated to places he knew he’d be seen, such as Robert Emmett’s, a bar near the Times’s headquarters, and Siberia, a downscale media hangout that had recently moved from the entranceway of a subway stop to an equally divey location near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. And although Blair rubbed many people at the Times the wrong way, many others liked him: He was gregarious and seemed to have an endless appetite for socializing.

  In January 2001, Jayson Blair was promoted to full-time staff reporter. At the Times, landing a staff position is similar to getting tenure at a university; because the Times is a union shop, it’s very difficult to fire full-time reporters.*30 Gerald Boyd headed the committee that recommended Blair’s promotion, despite the fact that Jon Landman, by then the editor of the metro section, didn’t think it was a wise idea. “It was clear that Gerald felt pressure to promote Jayson and that he thought it was the right thing to do,” Landman said later. “The racial dimension of this issue and Gerald’s obvious strong feelings made it especially sensitive. . . . I think race was the decisive factor in his promotion.” Boyd disagreed. Later, he told a newsroom committee investigating Blair’s career at the Times, “To say now that his promotion was about diversity in my view doesn’t begin to capture what was going on. He was a young, promising reporter who had done a job that warranted promotion.” But Blair’s performance, which had already been uneven, was about to get markedly worse.

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  OVER THE NEXT YEAR, Jayson Blair disappeared with a company car, was sexually suggestive with Times news clerks and interns, and began lying to get out of assignments. After September 11, he pretended he had a cousin who had died in the Pentagon to avoid writing any “Portraits of Grief,” the Times’s short, unbylined biographical sketches of the victims that collectively won a Pulitzer Prize. Blair seemed to bridle at the notion of doing work for which he might not get explicit credit.

  In October 2001, he wrote a story so riddled with errors that it attracted the attention of the newly installed Howell Raines. Blair had been assigned to cover a September 11 memorial concert at Madison Square Garden. His story ran in the paper on Sunday, October 21. Two days later, the Times ran the following correction:

  An article in some copies on Sunday about a benefit at Madison Square Garden for victims of the Sept. 11 terror attack misstated the price of the most expensive tickets. They were $10,000, not $1,000. The article also quoted incorrectly from a remark by former President Bill Clinton to the audience, many of them police officers and firefighters. Mr. Clinton said he had been given the bracelet of Raymond Downey, the deputy fire chief who died in the attack—not Chief Downey’s hat.

  Referring to the terrorists, he said, “I hope they saw this tonight, because they thought America was about money and power. They thought that if they took down the World Trade Center, we would collapse. But we’re not about mountains of money or towers of steel. You’re about mountains of courage and hearts of gold, and I hope they saw you here tonight.” He did not say “hearts of steel.”

  The next day, there was yet another correction to the story:

  An article in some late editions on Sunday about the benefit concert at Madison Square Garden for victims of the Sept. 11 attack referred incorrectly to scenes in a short film made for the event by Woody Allen, “Scenes From a Town I Love,” which showed New Yorkers talking on cellphones. An actor in one scene complained that his anthrax drugs had been stolen by muggers; he did not say the police took them. Another man talked about opening Starbucks coffee shops in Afghanistan after the war; he did not say one had already opened there.

  The article also included two performers erroneously among the participants. Bono and the Edge, of the band U2, were scheduled to appear but canceled before the concert.

  Blair, it turned out, had not even gone to the concert. He had written his review after getting drunk and watching a broadcast of the event at a local bar. Blair was given a formal reprimand, and he lashed out at his superiors, telling them that the people who hired him were more powerful and important than they. Still, Landman continued to bear down on the young reporter. In January 2002, he sent Blair a negative review. He also sent copies of the review to Boyd and Bill Schmidt, along with a note. “There’s big trouble I want you both to be aware of,” Landman wrote. In response, Boyd called Blair into his office for a one-on-one meeting. “You have enormous promise and potential,” Boyd said. “But your career is in your hands. I don’t know what you’re doing, drugs or what, and I don’t care. The issue is your performance, and unless you change, you are blowing a big opportunity.” A formal warning was placed in Blair’s personnel file.

  Instead of working to earn the trust of his editors, Blair reverted to behavior he’d been exhibiting at least as far back as college—he accused Landman of racism.*31 It was a shrewd move: By this point, Landman’s and Howell Raines’s private resentments had spilled out into the newsroom. Gerald Boyd had also said privately that he was not fond of Landman. That spring, Bill Keller had confirmed to The New Yorker that had he been named executive editor, he would likely have appointed Landman as his managing editor, a pronouncement that did nothing to help soothe Landman and Boyd’s testy relationship. (In the same article, Boyd described Keller as not “inclusive”—“a word,” The New Yorker noted, “with deep meaning for a fifty-one-year-old black man.”) Over the next several months, as his performance worsened, Blair took two personal leaves from work. He said later he was being treated for drug and alcohol dependencies. After he returned from his second leave, two of Blair’s supervisors, Nancy Sharkey and Jeannie Pinder, devised a written plan to oversee Blair and his performance. Gerald Boyd refused to let them present Blair with the plan. It was, Boyd said, “something we had never done” and therefore could be seen as discriminatory.

  By the summer of 2002, after months of shoddy work and erratic behavior, Blair orchestrated a transfer to the Times’s sports department. Landman warned Blair’s new supervisors ab
out Blair’s track record. Before he moved up to his sports-department desk on the fourth floor of the Times building, Blair told national editor Jim Roberts that he was available for assignments if anything came up.

  From May through October 2002, Blair wrote fifty-six stories—about two a week—along with three short squibs for the paper’s gossip column. (In the first six months of 2001, Blair wrote fifty-eight full stories in addition to fifty shorter items.) Despite his putative placement in the sports department, most of his stories continued to be filed to the metro desk, and they focused on mundane subjects like a new Con Edison substation in midtown Manhattan or a new waterfront TV tower. The vast majority of Blair’s stories appeared deep inside the Times’s metro section, and many of them ran only in the editions of the paper printed and distributed in the New York metropolitan area.

  Blair’s correction rate also went down during this time. Later, in several conversations, Blair would say that Jon Landman was the only editor at the Times who realized he just needed to slow down. “In a weird way, I think he’s a real honest and honorable man,” Blair told me in the spring of 2003. “I actually have more appreciation for him, in particular for the way he helped my recovery in the beginning.”*32 At the time, though, he told colleagues how much he despised the metro editor. Meanwhile, Blair’s personal life seemed to be spinning out of control. He was besotted with a young intern in the Times’s photo department, a Polish émigré named Zuza Glowacka, with whom he was spending most of his free time. His apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, was littered with broken furniture and rotting food, according to his landlord at the time. There was fungus growing in the bathroom and mold in the kitchen. When Blair moved out that fall, the landlord, who had considered herself a friend of Blair’s, contemplated taking the young reporter to court. “It was real filth,” she said. “Imagine using a bathroom for two and a half years and never cleaning it.”

  According to his own accounts and those of his friends, Blair was sleepless for days on end. For the first time in his life, he started talking about leaving journalism for good. “He was just spinning out,” says a friend of Blair’s. “Talking about how he had to kill Jayson Blair the journalist so Jayson the person could live.”

  SNIPER TIME

  In October 2002, an unknown sniper began a murderous rampage in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, the final denouement in what had been an exhausting and bewildering year. Since September 11, the Times had been on overdrive, pouring money and manpower into the terrorist attacks, the war in Afghanistan, the anthrax letters, the corporate scandals roiling the country, and the threat of an invasion in Iraq. It felt as if the paper were on a war footing all the time. That pace suited Howell Raines just fine—he had no problem driving his troops hard.

  What he did mind was getting beaten, and he was worried the Times was getting beaten but good on the sniper story. Howell Raines, Gerald Boyd, and national editor Jim Roberts scrambled to find reporters to parachute in and flood the zone. At the time, Raines said he and Boyd had decided to appoint Jayson Blair to the paper’s sniper coverage. After all, Blair had grown up and studied in the D.C. area and had some experience covering local law enforcement for The Washington Post. “This guy’s hungry,” Raines said. Neither Raines nor Boyd informed Roberts about Blair’s extensive disciplinary record or numerous corrections; Raines would later claim he hadn’t even been aware of Blair’s problems.

  On October 30, six days after arriving in Maryland, Jayson Blair broke out of the pack with a front-page story that featured exclusive details about the arrest of John Muhammad. The piece was sourced to five anonymous law enforcement officials—two reportedly from Maryland and the other three from federal agencies—and said that investigators had stopped an interrogation of Muhammad under orders from the White House. Blair also wrote that Muhammad had been on the verge of explaining “the roots of his anger” when the interrogation was halted.

  The piece caused an immediate uproar. Reporters and editors in the Times’s Washington bureau raised questions about Blair’s story even before it ran—how was it, they asked, that a green metro reporter was able to land multiple anonymous law enforcement sources on one of the most hotly contested stories of the year? What’s more, the D.C. bureau’s own reporting indicated Muhammad hadn’t been talking about anything like “the roots of his anger” but was instead discussing mundane details of his confinement, such as when he’d be allowed a shower.

  “We had sources waving us away from that,” says Jill Abramson. She called Jim Roberts in New York, and the story was changed to reflect dissent in the reporting. The Washington bureau’s reporters were still not thrilled with the story, which now contained as many caveats as it did assertions.

  “When I read that first story, I remember thinking, Holy cow, could this really be him?” says David Barstow, a forty-year-old investigative reporter who sat next to Blair in metro when the two first joined the paper in 1999. “I assumed he got the byline because he got the first tip or something. But everyone knew there’s no way some reporter could just wander into that situation and get three federal law enforcement sources and two state sources right away. It would be an extraordinary thing even for the most extraordinary reporter. It wasn’t just his age, but the arc of his career. There was no history of that type of reporting.”

  After Blair’s story ran, the U.S. Attorney from Maryland and an FBI official issued public statements refuting parts of the story. Within days, The Washington Post was running multiple articles picking apart central components of Blair’s piece. In the media dustup that followed, Blair told Erik Wemple at the Washington City Paper, “The Post got beat in their own back yard, and I can understand why they would have sore feelings.” Times reporters cringed at Blair’s statements; his showboating went against protocol at the Times, where reporters let their work speak for itself.

  Howell Raines, however, told colleagues he had no problem with Blair’s comments. And indeed, at no time during the furor over Blair’s reporting did Raines or Boyd ask Blair to tell them who his anonymous law enforcement sources were. Furthermore, even after complaints were made about his work, no one told Jim Roberts or other editors on the Times’s national desk about Blair’s disturbing track record. Instead, incredibly, Raines sent Blair an e-mail, which he also forwarded to a broad group of editors, including Jim Roberts, Jon Landman, and Jill Abramson, praising Blair for his work. “Jayson,” Raines wrote, “I should have already emailed to congratulate you on that great scoop in Wednesday’s paper. The Post’s follow up merely served to confirm the strength of your sources. This is great shoe-leather reporting and especially impressive because you were dropped in the middle of a very big running story being covered by scores of other reporters. I am very impressed and most grateful. All best, Howell.”

  Raines’s memo was viewed as much as a thinly veiled message to Landman and Abramson as it was an “attaboy” to Blair. “I interpreted it as, ‘Fuck you, Washington bureau, with your scaredy-cat jealous reporters who shoot down someone else’s story because they can’t get their own,’ ” says Abramson.

  Later, Blair’s editor on the sniper stories, Nick Fox, said he would have felt much more wary of Blair’s work if he had been warned in advance. “I can’t imagine accepting unnamed sources from him as the basis of a story had we known what was going on,” he said. “If somebody had said, ‘Watch out for this guy,’ I would have questioned everything that he did. I can’t imagine being comfortable with going with the story at all, if I had known that the metro editors flat out didn’t trust him.” But instead of warnings, the editors were being given every indication that Blair was a favorite of the paper’s top editors and, moreover, trustworthy. At one point, according to several people in the newsroom, Boyd walked by the Times’s metro desk holding one of Blair’s front-page exclusives. “See?” Boyd said. “At least national knows how to get good work out of this guy.”

  Less than two months later, another Blair exclusive would receive
public rebuke. In a December 22 front-page story, Blair wrote that all the evidence in the sniper case indicated that teenage suspect Lee Malvo was the triggerman in the shootings. Again, all of Blair’s sources were anonymous. Again, a prosecutor publicly denounced the report. This time, Raines checked Blair’s reporting by comparing what he had written against what had appeared in The Washington Post and, not finding any major discrepancies, decided his reporting was solid. (This hadn’t always been Raines’s modus operandi. The previous February, business reporter Gretchen Morgenson had written a story about Enron that detailed how the company was a house of cards built on the momentum of a constantly rising stock price. The piece contained one crucial anonymous source. Upon reading the piece, Raines demanded Morgenson tell him the source’s identity. Morgenson, who had promised she wouldn’t reveal the source’s identity under any circumstances, refused, and Raines spiked the story. Two months later, Morgenson won a Pulitzer Prize for her subsequent Enron coverage, and for the next two years, Glenn Kramon, Morgenson’s editor, carried her spiked story around with him in his briefcase. “I couldn’t throw it away,” he says. “It was so good. And—this is totally irrational—I kept thinking, I’ll get it in the paper someday.”)

  Blair was not just covering the snipers’ trial. He was increasingly identifying with Lee Malvo, the teenage suspect. Within months, Blair was circulating drafts of a book proposal on the sniper story in which he discussed his own anger and frustration as an African American. “Zuza [Glowacka] encouraged me to look for answers about the history of violence in my own family and that of Lee Malvo, suggesting the search would not be in vain, if it at least ended my restless angst,” Blair wrote. “The observations about the present day criminal justice system and the historical context are what sets this work apart, giving it a broad appeal to all those interested in uncovering this rare blend of shattered dreams and violence that is endemic in our society.”