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Jayson Blair unfolds his psyche for the world to see
“Anyone who tells you that my race didn’t play a role in my career at The New York Times is lying to you,” Jayson Blair tells The New York Observer. “Both racial preferences and racism played a role. And I would argue that they didn’t balance each other out. Racism had much more of an impact.” The interview continues:
“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?” Comments
There’s an issue here that Jayson Blair is apparently clueless about: He didn’t fool his bosses and colleagues to any significant degree. Raines, et al knew he was making tons of errors, perhaps they even knew about his fabrications but kept on letting it go and promoted anyway. Only when another newpaper dicovered his plagarism (hence the possibility of a lawsuit) did the “paper of record” take action. Stephen Glass, by contrast, really did fool his superiors. Mr. Glass wasn’t a member of a preferred minority and therefore had to hoodwink the editors at New Republic. In other words, he woudn’t be given ninth and tenth chances after his errors were exposed and promoted to further the doctrine of “Diversity.” In other words, racial preferences didn’t only sustain Blair in his career as a reporter; they sustained him in his career as a con artist. In sociopathic manner, he boasts that his skill in scamming the Times proves that he’s smart after all—when in fact he was only allowed to get away with all the scamming because of his race. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on May 21, 2003 8:52 PM |