Jayson Blair’s dizzying fall from grace
PBS documentary delves into New York Times plagiarism scandal, impact on journalism
Mention Jayson Blair’s name to any journalist and it quickly becomes shorthand for the failure of accountability in mainstream media.
The fact that the 27-year-old reporter had plagiarized dozens of stories and made up facts when he sometimes wasn’t even in the city he was supposed to be reporting in, was astonishing. The fact that it happened at the New York Times, considered by some the best paper in the world, has made it the stuff of legend.
More than a decade has passed, ample time to reflect on the legacy of Blair in the new digital world. That is the subject of a PBS Independent Lens documentary airing Monday at 10 p.m.: A Fragile Trust: Plagiarism, Power and Jayson Blair at The New York Times.
It features rare interviews with Blair from 2007 to 2011 talking in detail about his meltdown, which he says was fuelled by drugs including cocaine and mental illness.
Macarena Hernandez was the last person to be plagiarized by Blair.
Hernandez had interned with Blair at the Times. As a reporter at the San Antonio Express-News in 2003, she was covering the story of Juanita Anguiano, whose son Edward was the only American solider still missing in action in Iraq.
The reporter had gotten a rare interview with Anguiano and she was surprised to see that the New York Times did too. Blair had the story in the Times with a Los Fresnos, Texas, dateline. “My first reaction was I couldn’t believe that Jason was in my backyard and he hadn’t bothered to call me. I would have totally helped him out,” Hernandez told the Star. Then she looked at the story. That discovery led to the Times doing a 14,000-word “mea culpa” and examining hundreds of stories written by Blair. It also led to the toppling of two of the top editors at the paper. “For me, it all began to fall apart when I started doing that story,” says Blair in the documentary. It also exposed a dangerous, institutional arrogance — in a day before the explosion of social media where newspapers were the opinion makers, and determined what was newsworthy and what wasn’t. “There is such a huge and utter respect for the Times,” says Hernandez. “I met people that Jason had plagiarized who said they called the Times and they blew (them) off. Even when I told my editors what had happened to me, they were tiptoeing around the issue. There is such utter respect for the Times. Because who is going to believe what we say? But in this case all you had to do was compare the copy.” The film examines the events of a decade ago, but it also raises issues of race and newsrooms, and what newspapers mean in the digital age. Because Blair was African-American, his downfall had a profoundly negative impact on the efforts of newsrooms to diversify staff. “How did a story about plagiarism end up being about race?” asks Hernandez. “When a white guy plagiarizes, nobody says anything about white reporters. But when a person of colour plagiarizes, all of a sudden people of colour become suspects in their own newsrooms.” Today, it’s much easier to catch plagiarism. There are programs dedicated to finding out whether intellectual property has been pilfered. But the Internet age means that it’s also easier to plagiarize, says Hernandez. “We live in this copy and paste culture. It’s happening everywhere, in- cluding university and college campuses. It’s become part of the culture.”
Despite the subject, filmmaker Samantha Grant says she is still optimistic about the ability of newspapers to be agents of change.
“One of the big take-aways that I hope people get when they watch the film is that the democratization of the media is a great thing,” she says. “But I don’t think that independent journalists can or should ever replace institutional journalism and that, in fact, we really need these journalism institutions now more than ever before, because there are large corporations, governments that an individual will have a much harder time taking on.”
Blair, meanwhile, is making a living as a “life coach” giving advice to others. But for someone who gives out life lessons, it seems that Blair still needs to look within. Asked why he did what he did, the explanation remains elusive. “I have no good answer for it,” he says.