“Anyone who tells you that my race didn’t play a role in my career at the New York Ti

[Sparrowhawk]

Unrepentant Blair taunts 'idiot' editors
By Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post


Jayson Blair is lashing out at the New York Times, saying that "racism had much more of an impact" on his career at the paper than affirmative action did and boasting about his repeated deception of Times editors.

IN AN extraordinary interview with the New York Observer being published today, the former reporter laughed about the Times's investigation of him and seemed angry that his serial fabrications weren't being properly appreciated.
"I don't understand why I am the bumbling affirmative action hire when 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. Glass, who was fired by the New Republic for inventing stories five years ago, "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. If they're all so brilliant and I'm such an affirmative action hire, how come they didn't catch me?"

BLASTS 'IDIOT' EDITORS
Times editors have denied that they treated the error-prone Blair leniently because he is African American -- although Executive Editor Howell Raines has said he might have done so subconsciously. But Blair told reporter Sridhar Pappu:

"Anyone who tells you that my race didn't play a role in my career at the New York Times is lying to you. Both racial preferences and racism played a role. And I would argue that they didn't balance each other out."

While ridiculing what he called "idiot" editors at the Times, he also said it was "kind of unfair" to blame Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd for his misconduct. He said Boyd, the paper's highest-ranking black editor, tried to block his promotion to the national staff.

The only point at which Blair, 27, appeared to blame himself was when he said he might have been too young for "a snake pit" like the Times.

But he kept returning to the question of race, telling the Manhattan weekly: "I was under a lot of pressure. I was black at the New York Times, which is something that hurts you as much as it helps you. I certainly have health problems which probably led to me having to kill Jayson Blair, the journalist. ... So Jayson Blair the human being could live, Jayson Blair the journalist had to die."

Blair did not criticize metropolitan editor Jonathan Landman, who tried to help the reporter but told his bosses in an e-mail 13 months ago that they had to stop Blair from continuing to write for the Times. But he said Landman, whom he called an honorable man, refuses to believe that some of his subordinates are "racist." Blair added that "there are senior managers at the New York Times who want African American reporters to succeed, and there are hundreds of white junior managers who resent that and don't."

CENTER OF DEBATE
Blair has been at the center of a fierce, racially charged debate over how badly the Times handled the lies and plagiarism that led to his May 1 resignation. In a 7,000-word mea culpa, the paper said Blair had fabricated 36 stories -- including one that featured the father of rescued POW Jessica Lynch choking up, complete with an erroneous description of his West Virginia home because Blair had lied about being there.

When the Times investigation was published, Blair said, he "just couldn't stop laughing" because his description of the West Virginia home had been so far off from reality.

Blair dismissed the notion that senior editors had protected him, rattling off the names of Raines, Boyd and others who he said never helped him, including a female editor whom he described as caring only about pretty Jewish girls.

Observer Editor Peter Kaplan said Blair appeared "deeply angry" at the Times. "He seems to have obscured his own moral lapses in what he did, in deference to the racial injuries he feels he suffered."

Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said yesterday that the paper would have no comment. But in a memo yesterday, Raines and Boyd said they planned to demonstrate "our absolute determination to change the way this newsroom works," including the hiring of 20 more people to ease workloads at the paper. They also said, in response to complaints about a top-down management style, they would "push authority on news coverage and staff assignments down to the department heads" and "work with them in a consultative way on matters of news judgment and deployment of resources."

Describing himself in the Observer interview as having struggled with alcohol and cocaine since he was a teenager, Blair said he botched the coverage of a 2001 benefit concert, which required two corrections, because he was drunk on assignment.

PROBLEM LASTED YEARS
Blair maintained that his web of lies started in earnest in January and that he had fudged the facts perhaps five times before that. However, The Washington Post has reported that he badly distorted an interview done for him in 2000 by a Times freelancer, Lisa Suhay, and threatened to get the paper to drop her if she didn't stop pressing for a correction.

The Post has also reported that in 1999, while working as an intern at the Boston Globe, Blair faked an interview with D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams. Blair told the Observer that his former Globe colleagues were "a bunch of thin-skinned, sheltered, cocooned babies."

Blair was more restrained in a separate statement to CNN on Monday, saying he is "sorry" and wants to write his story -- he has hired an agent to entertain book and movie offers -- so that "others will learn from my mistakes." But, he said, "there are many assumptions being made, that because I'm black, Gerald Boyd was my mentor, and because my closest friend, Zuza Glowacka, is Polish, I was trying to gain favor with Howell Raines. People will be surprised when the whole story comes out.' " Glowacka, a Times clerk who has resigned, is a friend of Raines's wife, Krystyna Anna Stachowiak.




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[Sparrowhawk]

[arzach]

Blair is full of crap...just reaching into the deck for another 'race' card...

[Armory]

Total and complete jackass. Drugs are bad mmmkay......