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over on the Times
Plagiarists delights in attention over misdeeds
By Jeff Bercovici
All across America, journalists are wringing their hands over the Jayson Blair case. The only one who’s not, it seems, is Jayson Blair himself.
Far from repenting his misdeeds, the 27-year-old ex-New York Times reporter is glorying in them, celebrating himself for fleecing the esteemed newspaper and exhorting others to admire his audacity.
In a lengthy interview published today in the New York Observer, Blair expresses no regret at having been fired from the Times, calling the paper a "snakepit," full of idiots and racists.
Anyway, he claims, he was planning on getting out of the newspaper business soon owing to unspecified health problems. (His next career, apparently, will be memoirist; Blair has a literary agent and is said to be considering book deal offers that will fetch him somewhere in the mid-six figures.)
Like a pyromaniac who admires the blaze he has kindled even as firefighters battle to put it out, Blair is obsessed with the press coverage of his fall from grace.
What wounds him is the perception that he resorted to plagiarism and fabrications out of necessity rather than out of sheer perversity.
Blair, who is black, is particularly galled by the suggestion that the Times kept him on to fill some sort of racial quota rather than because he simply outsmarted his editors.
"If they’re all so brilliant and I’m such an affirmative-action hire, how come they didn’t catch me?" he asked in the Observer interview.
Blair believes his shenanigans are at least as impressive as those of Stephen Glass, who was busted five years ago for inventing facts for his New Republic articles.
"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," said Blair.
While he allows that his race was a factor in getting him hired and promoted, he says that his skin color also caused problems for him.
"Both racial preferences and racism played a role," he said. "And I would argue that they didn’t balance each other out. Racism had much more of an impact."
Blair also wants the world to know that he never would have been caught if he hadn’t wanted to be, suggesting that his transgressions were a form of acting out.
"Was I too young? For a newspaper reporter’s job at a great newspaper, maybe not. Was I too young for a snake pit like that? Maybe."
Untroubled by conscience, Blair enjoys a laugh at the expense of his former bosses while reminiscing over his favorite prank: a completely made-up description of rescued POW Jessica Lynch’s family home.
"The description was just so far off from reality," he said. "The way they described it in The Times story — someone read a portion of it for me. I just couldn’t stop laughing."
May 21, 2003© 2003 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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