Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  By that time, the research staff had printed out stacks of Blair’s clips, and the five reporters started to divide them up. David Barstow and Adam Liptak dove into the sniper pile, Jonathan Glater took the stories Blair had written about the family of Jessica Lynch, and Jacques Steinberg grabbed the missing-soldiers pile. Dan Barry, meanwhile, was examining the arc of Blair’s career and trying to piece together details about his rise in journalism. By now, the working assumption was that the final analysis would be in the paper the following Tuesday or Wednesday, May 6 or 7, and would run around 2,500 words.

  Even that seemed like a tall order. “It was starting to sink in that this was going to be an extraordinarily draining experience,” says Liptak. The subject of the project obviously made it unique, but it was atypical in other ways as well. Many investigative teams have experience working together. The reporters understand one another’s strengths and weaknesses. The editors know when to push harder, when to ask more questions, and when to pull back. This team had no experience working together on what would prove to be an immensely tiring and harrowing project. Glenn Kramon and Lorne Manly had worked together on the business desk, and Glater and Steinberg were both business reporters (although Steinberg had just been transferred several weeks earlier). Neither Barry nor Barstow had worked with the men who would edit and shape their copy, and on an assignment like this everyone was going to need lots of support and protection. “That day, I remember my shoulders just slumping,” Glater says as he recalls the piles of clips and the implications of the project. “And just thinking, This is going to be a really miserable task. And besides that, I worried it could be a crappy career move—if the article was something Gerald or Howell was unhappy with, that would or could be a really bad thing. It was going to be a very sensitive exercise.”

  The team decided its first task would be to try to reverse engineer Blair’s national desk stories to determine if Blair had routinely collected details and quotations from secondary sources instead of firsthand reporting. The reporters were working with librarians, and as they went through Blair’s articles, they’d mark anything that stood out—specific physical descriptions of a house or a living room, for example, or a particularly poignant quote. The librarians would then pull other clips written about the same subject and search for similar phrases or descriptions that might prove plagiarism. The examples kept piling up: On April 3, Blair had quoted Donald Nelson, a friend of Private Jessica Lynch’s, reacting to a letter he had received from Lynch: “We just bawled like babies when we got the letter,” Blair wrote. With a couple of clicks of the mouse, the librarians realized an Associated Press dispatch from April 2 had included the exact same quote. On April 7, Blair described a funeral service for Private First Class Brandon Sloan, the son of a Cleveland minister. Blair wrote: “The senior pastor, the Rev. Larry Howard, opened the prayer service by reminding the several hundred people who gathered that God was ‘bigger than Hussein.’ Mr. Sloan bowed his head and closed his eyes.” Soon, the librarians found a March 29 article in The Washington Post in which Tamara Jones wrote: “Now, as the Rev. Larry Howard opened the prayer service for Brandy Sloan, reminding several hundred congregants that ‘God is bigger than Hussein,’ Tandy Sloan closed his eyes and bowed his head.”

  The reporters were also reaching out to Times reporters and photographers who had shared bylines with Blair or worked with him on assignment. Time and time again, photographers and other Times reporters told the team that, yes, they had been on location with Blair. But time and time again, it turned out that Blair had never actually met with them—he’d said he was on his cellphone down the block, or around the corner at a deli, or just driving away from a church. Haraz Ghanbari was a freelance photographer assigned to shoot an April 6 church service in Cleveland attended by the Reverend Sloan the day after his son had been pronounced dead in Iraq. Ghanbari called Blair fifteen times that day and reached him three of those times. Blair told Ghanbari he had momentarily left the church to get his cellphone fixed. Ghanbari took the pictures, and Blair filed the story, but they never met up. Only Ghanbari had actually been there.

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  JOURNALISM, its practitioners like to joke, is the perfect profession for people suffering from extreme attention deficit disorders. Reporters and editors can bore in on a subject for a week or a month or even a couple of years and then move on to something totally different. On a large daily paper like the Times, it’s not unusual for a single career to include stints as a foreign correspondent, a science reporter, a metro editor, and an arts writer. One of the delights of working at an institution with ample resources is the chance to get out and actually explore, to see the country (or the world), to meet new people, to not be tethered to a desk all day. Reporters fight—sometimes viciously—for the chance to travel on assignment. Even after Steinberg’s reporting had uncovered the likelihood that Jayson Blair had not gone to Texas, there was still an inability to fully accept that he might not have been traveling on assignment at all. Plagiarism was one thing. It might be the result of crumbling under deadline pressures, raging insecurity, or just bad writing chops—and in his brief career, Blair had repeatedly demonstrated just these tendencies. But not showing up at all? Then what was the point of being at the Times, of being a journalist?

  Late on Sunday, May 4, the team began to discuss how their piece would progress. Barstow and Barry were especially vocal in their desire to have the piece be edited by someone other than Howell Raines or Gerald Boyd. They also said they thought a Tuesday deadline was unreasonable, as was a proposed length of 2,500 words. “Even by Sunday, the big drama for us was, Were they going to give us the space we need? Were they going to recuse themselves? And if they don’t, what do we do?” Barstow says. “I don’t think there was any doubt that if they tried to fuck with it, we would have walked.” Kramon did all he could to reassure his colleagues. “I gave them my word that [Raines and Boyd] wouldn’t influence the piece in any way,” Kramon says. “That weekend, Barry was saying, ‘They’re gonna cook this.’ And I just said, ‘No, they won’t. I’ll lie in front of it.’ ”

  On Monday, May 5, as the newsroom returned to its weekday rhythms, the team was moved from the eleventh floor to an empty room on the fourth floor where new hires were trained on the paper’s computer system. Technically, the fourth floor is also part of the newsroom—it houses many of the paper’s “soft news” sections, including the sports and culture departments. But it was removed from the din of the main third-floor newsroom and, more significantly, from the metro and national desks, where Blair did most of his work.

  That morning, the team asked Howell Raines to send a formal staffwide e-mail asking reporters and editors to cooperate fully with any questions that arose. Raines refused. He told the reporters if anyone on staff had reservations about cooperating, they could come to him and he’d reassure them. For a team that was growing ever more certain that Raines would be a likely subject of their piece, it wasn’t the answer they had hoped to hear.

  By this point, the reporting team was realizing the degree to which the increasingly dysfunctional culture of The New York Times had affected Blair’s career, especially in its latter stages. The Times—like every newspaper in the country—has always had its share of editors and reporters who feel disenfranchised or resentful. But under Howell Raines, the frustration that normally simmered just below the surface seemed to explode. Desk editors weren’t speaking to one another. Reporters were almost at the point of open revolt. There was such fear of Raines’s temper and dismissive attitude that some editors said they kept to themselves concerns about shoddy stories or reporters.

  A newsroom where editors are scared to voice their concerns is a disaster waiting to happen. Newspapers are built on trust, and for that trust to survive there needs to be a robust and open exchange of information. Even worse is the newsroom where concerns are raised but ignored by the top editors. As the reporters were discovering, that seemed to be the case under Howe
ll Raines. The more warning signs and public admonishments the reporters found scattered throughout Jayson Blair’s files, the more they became aware of a culture that seemed to discourage an open exchange of information, an exchange that likely would have prevented Jayson Blair from ever getting assigned to the sniper story in the first place. That weekend, the reporters discovered an April 2002 e-mail from Jon Landman that seemed particularly damning. The e-mail, sent to newsroom administrators, including Bill Schmidt, said, “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”

  By the afternoon of Monday, May 5, “we were already seeing that there were going to be some pretty awkward questions that we were going to have to ask our bosses,” Barstow says. “It was clear we had to address management issues,” says Manly. “We all worked there. We knew the problems. The obvious question for the reader was, How the hell did this happen? Part of the answer was that Jayson was well liked in spite of his problems. But part of it was how things changed under Howell, how senior management felt frozen out, how a malaise set in and people just stopped fighting back.” The team grew more nervous as the day went on and sought ways to protect itself and whatever it might uncover. That day, Glenn Kramon and Lorne Manly asked Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd to recuse themselves from the editing process. Boyd, without making any commitments one way or the other, said it was his fiduciary duty to read every story that went into the paper. Still, by Monday afternoon, Al Siegal was brought in to oversee the entire project.

  To call the sixty-four-year-old Siegal a Times institution is an understatement. He was first hired at the Times in 1960 and, aside from a brief stint as a reporter, has worked mainly as a copy editor and then masthead editor. Since 1977, he has overseen usage and style throughout the paper. More than any other person—more than Arthur Sulzberger, more than Howell Raines, more than famed Washington correspondent R. W. “Johnny” Apple—Al Siegal is the institutional memory and conscience of The New York Times. He’s in charge of the paper’s corrections. He co-authored The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage and wrote the introduction to Kill Duck Before Serving: Red Faces at The New York Times, a compendium of the paper’s most humorous errors. Siegal is the person editors go to when they want to know what the precedent is—if the Times ever let its columnists disavow a news story, for instance. He’s the man who wrote the 96-point headline that ran across the top of The New York Times on September 12, 2001—U.S. ATTACKED. (It was only the third time in the history of the paper that such a large headline type was used. The other two times were when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969 and when President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974.) And it was Al Siegal who named the special section created to cover the aftershocks of the September 11 attacks “A Nation Challenged.” For Siegal, Howell Raines’s tenure had been a happy change. He felt more vital than he had under Joe Lelyveld and appreciated the extent to which Raines made him realize he was needed in the day-to-day operations of the paper.

  Siegal’s seriousness, dry manner, and physical presence make him an intimidating force in the Times. He’s a heavyset man, and he moves with purposeful intent. Not a small number of reporters and editors find him cutting and occasionally cruel, and his public dressings-down can make reporters and copy editors feel both superfluous and stupid. But no one doubts his love of The New York Times. After he was put in charge of the project, members of the reporting team began to petition Siegal, asking for a guarantee that neither Howell Raines nor Gerald Boyd would see the final product before it was printed. “They half begged and half demanded,” Siegal says. Some reporters said they’d heard Blair had protectors among members of the masthead. The reporters tried to argue on precedent, drawing a comparison to the report filed by the ombudsman of The Washington Post in the wake of the 1981 Janet Cooke scandal, in which a young reporter was found to have invented an eight-year-old heroin addict about whom she wrote a Pulitzer Prize–winning feature story. Siegal told the reporters that Blair didn’t have any protectors and that The New York Times didn’t have an ombudsman. The story would be edited in whatever way the executive editor saw fit. “I don’t seek that kind of autonomy,” Siegal says. “The editor is the editor. But I told them I would do what I can do to see there is no tampering. I will throw my body in front of it. I couldn’t understand what everyone was so scared about, because I wasn’t afraid.”

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  BY MONDAY NIGHT, the reporting team had begun to get a handle on the extent of the deception they were facing. That evening, in an almost five-hour meeting, Jacques Steinberg and David Barstow had met with members of the paper’s news administration office. The team would not be given access to Blair’s employment records; however, Steinberg and Barstow were shown physical copies of Blair’s expense reports, cellphone records, and filed receipts. They took copious notes.

  For the rest of the night, the two reporters tried to triangulate Blair’s whereabouts, comparing cellphone records, receipts, datelines, and stories. They realized he had handed in receipts from restaurants and coffee shops in Brooklyn during times when he said he was out of town—Blair submitted a receipt for Tutta Pasta, a Brooklyn restaurant, when he said he was eating with a law enforcement official in Washington. Blair’s cellphone records occasionally indicated that a call was made from somewhere outside New York City—from Washington, for instance. Steinberg and Barstow realized that on the Times’s plan, a call from within the home calling zone would show up as blank, so they could determine when he had been making calls from New York City and when he had been elsewhere.

  As they continued working through the night, the reporters realized that Blair had, in all likelihood, remained in New York City for most of the last six months, a period during which he was supposedly jetting across the country on assignment. Every time the reporters thought maybe Blair actually had been reporting from the field, they would soon realize they were wrong. “[Later that week], I interviewed [national editor] Jim Roberts about his confrontation with Jayson” about the Anguiano story, Barstow says. “Jim’s telling me how Jayson described this red stucco house, how he described the two Jeeps out front and the rose garden. And how Jim asked for the photo of the house from the photo department, and that Jayson was right on every detail. I began to think maybe he was there.” But it turned out that Blair had simply gained access to Merlin, the Times’s internal photo-archiving system. “It was like a horror movie where the killer is actually on the phone inside the house,” Barstow says. “We realized he had actually been in the building when he said he was out in the field.” Increasingly, the reporters were toggling between excitement over the incredible story they were uncovering and dismay at what Blair had done to their newspaper. “None of the reporters took glee in what we were finding,” says Barry. “Having said that, though, there’s no question that our journalistic juices were flowing. We had a big story, and we couldn’t wait to tell it. The only questions were time and space.”

  At 9:00 p.m. on Monday, May 5, the team gathered in the page-one conference room for dinner. It was a ritual that would last all week. The conference room sits at the top of the staircase that connects the third and fourth floors. Several times every day, the masthead and desk editors meet here to discuss the next day’s paper, with Al Siegal and the executive and managing editors presiding over the meetings. “We would talk a little bit about what was going on,” Barry says of the team’s dinners, which often featured large amounts of barbecue. “But we’d also just sit there with this sense of exhaustion.”

  After dinner, Steinberg and Barstow continued checking records. “It was excruciating,” Steinberg says. “We’re sitting there trying to figure out—okay, if he had breakfast at this restaurant in Brooklyn, maybe he still had time to get to D.C. by the afternoon?” Adam Liptak and Jonathan Glater were making calls to the subjects of Blair’s stories, and Dan Barry was prowling the newsroom, looking for people to interview. “I’d walk around, and it would be like, ‘Uh-oh, here comes IAB,’ ” Barry says,
referring to the police department’s Internal Affairs Bureau. “Boy, did we laugh.” Glater had to call several people who had lost family members in Iraq.

  “That night, I couldn’t sleep because I was so mad,” he says. “I was calling this person up who suffered an incredible loss. And of all the inane and irrelevant things to talk about, I’m asking, ‘Do you remember talking to such-and-such a reporter?’ It just felt gross.”

  “We were seeing indications that he was literally e-mailing the national editor about his progress on a story from another floor in the building,” Steinberg says. “That night, we’re sitting there as a group, saying for the first time, ‘Okay, this could be a gigantic fraud.’ The initial mandate—to correct the record—wouldn’t be enough. To say he got this story wrong was not explaining who is this guy and how did he carry it out and how did he rise?” These were questions the reporters themselves desperately wanted answered.

  It was hard not to be shocked. There had been numerous cases of journalistic malfeasance in the past—the Times’s Blood Brothers dispatch, say, or the Post’s Janet Cooke story. But with the exception of Stephen Glass, a New Republic reporter who had completely fabricated a number of feature stories in the late 1990s, there weren’t any comparable cases of widespread, almost sociopathic fraud. And The New Republic is a rarefied political weekly that reached a tenth of the Times’s daily audience; Glass was writing feature stories about fringe groups he made up out of whole cloth. Blair was stitching his fraudulent accounts into some of the most heavily covered stories of the day. His “reporting” had been featured on the front page time and time again. It was moved on the Times’s newswires and reprinted by other papers around the country. The Times is the paper of record. What it writes is history. Blair had fabricated history.