Hard News (17 page)

Jayson Blair was a beneficiary of this pressure. He did have some talent to go with his energy and exuberance, although neither his writing skills nor his reporting abilities were exceptional, and there are dozens of genuinely talented, eager reporters trying to fight their way into the
Times
every day. In June 1999, Blair was invited back to the
Times,
this time for a probational reporting position. Newsroom administrators later said they had assumed he had graduated from Maryland on schedule, in December 1998. In fact, Blair still had extensive course work outstanding when he returned to the paper.

Blair began his career at the
Times
working in the “cop shop,” the pressroom at New York City’s police headquarters. From very early on, Blair bragged of his relationship with senior editors at the
Times,
particularly Gerald Boyd. There were reasons to believe him: Many reporters were under the impression that Boyd took African American reporters under his wing. What’s more, Blair seemed to have an inside track to people’s personnel files, and he made frequent references to employee evaluations or private notes sent between editors, which he hinted he had gotten through his supposed connections.

From the get-go, Blair’s performance was spotty. There was the time Blair was at a party when he was supposed to be covering a crime scene. He told friends he once passed out at
Times
headquarters and woke up there the next morning. He consumed copious amounts of Scotch, and he seemed to blow through money. He showed up to work in dirty, stained clothes. Charles Strum, his editor at the time, said later, “I told him that he needed to find a different way to nourish himself than drinking Scotch, smoking cigarettes, and buying Cheez Doodles from the vending machine.”

“He always struck me as having really bad boundaries and being really immature,” says a
Times
reporter who first met Blair during those years and remained friendly with him throughout his time at the paper. “His biggest skill seemed to be office politics. You’d see his stories, and they never stood out. There was nothing really memorable in his writing.” But he was always eager for more assignments.

That November, Blair was promoted to the position of intermediate reporter. Over the next four years, Blair furthered his reputation for being one of the paper’s most tireless gossips. He knew, or claimed to know, virtually everyone who worked in journalism. He was the type of voracious self-promoter who constantly bragged about his connections to editors at the
Times
and to reporters at other papers, and he made a particular point of discussing his supposed connections to Boyd. He made no secret about the fact that he was often an anonymous source for several of the city’s media columnists. He gravitated to places he knew he’d be seen, such as Robert Emmett’s, a bar near the
Times
’s headquarters, and Siberia, a downscale media hangout that had recently moved from the entranceway of a subway stop to an equally divey location near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. And although Blair rubbed many people at the
Times
the wrong way, many others liked him: He was gregarious and seemed to have an endless appetite for socializing.

In January 2001, Jayson Blair was promoted to full-time staff reporter. At the
Times,
landing a staff position is similar to getting tenure at a university; because the
Times
is a union shop, it’s very difficult to fire full-time reporters.
^*30
Gerald Boyd headed the committee that recommended Blair’s promotion, despite the fact that Jon Landman, by then the editor of the metro section, didn’t think it was a wise idea. “It was clear that Gerald felt pressure to promote Jayson and that he thought it was the right thing to do,” Landman said later. “The racial dimension of this issue and Gerald’s obvious strong feelings made it especially sensitive. . . . I think race was the decisive factor in his promotion.” Boyd disagreed. Later, he told a newsroom committee investigating Blair’s career at the
Times,
“To say now that his promotion was about diversity in my view doesn’t begin to capture what was going on. He was a young, promising reporter who had done a job that warranted promotion.” But Blair’s performance, which had already been uneven, was about to get markedly worse.

—————

O
VER THE NEXT YEAR,
Jayson Blair disappeared with a company car, was sexually suggestive with
Times
news clerks and interns, and began lying to get out of assignments. After September 11, he pretended he had a cousin who had died in the Pentagon to avoid writing any “Portraits of Grief,” the
Times
’s short, unbylined biographical sketches of the victims that collectively won a Pulitzer Prize. Blair seemed to bridle at the notion of doing work for which he might not get explicit credit.

In October 2001, he wrote a story so riddled with errors that it attracted the attention of the newly installed Howell Raines. Blair had been assigned to cover a September 11 memorial concert at Madison Square Garden. His story ran in the paper on Sunday, October 21. Two days later, the
Times
ran the following correction:

An article in some copies on Sunday about a benefit at Madison Square Garden for victims of the Sept. 11 terror attack misstated the price of the most expensive tickets. They were $10,000, not $1,000. The article also quoted incorrectly from a remark by former President Bill Clinton to the audience, many of them police officers and firefighters. Mr. Clinton said he had been given the bracelet of Raymond Downey, the deputy fire chief who died in the attack—not Chief Downey’s hat.

Referring to the terrorists, he said, “I hope they saw this tonight, because they thought America was about money and power. They thought that if they took down the World Trade Center, we would collapse. But we’re not about mountains of money or towers of steel. You’re about mountains of courage and hearts of gold, and I hope they saw you here tonight.” He did not say “hearts of steel.”

The next day, there was yet another correction to the story:

An article in some late editions on Sunday about the benefit concert at Madison Square Garden for victims of the Sept. 11 attack referred incorrectly to scenes in a short film made for the event by Woody Allen, “Scenes From a Town I Love,” which showed New Yorkers talking on cellphones. An actor in one scene complained that his anthrax drugs had been stolen by muggers; he did not say the police took them. Another man talked about opening Starbucks coffee shops in Afghanistan after the war; he did not say one had already opened there.

The article also included two performers erroneously among the participants. Bono and the Edge, of the band U2, were scheduled to appear but canceled before the concert.

Blair, it turned out, had not even gone to the concert. He had written his review after getting drunk and watching a broadcast of the event at a local bar. Blair was given a formal reprimand, and he lashed out at his superiors, telling them that the people who hired him were more powerful and important than they. Still, Landman continued to bear down on the young reporter. In January 2002, he sent Blair a negative review. He also sent copies of the review to Boyd and Bill Schmidt, along with a note. “There’s big trouble I want you both to be aware of,” Landman wrote. In response, Boyd called Blair into his office for a one-on-one meeting. “You have enormous promise and potential,” Boyd said. “But your career is in your hands. I don’t know what you’re doing, drugs or what, and I don’t care. The issue is your performance, and unless you change, you are blowing a big opportunity.” A formal warning was placed in Blair’s personnel file.

Instead of working to earn the trust of his editors, Blair reverted to behavior he’d been exhibiting at least as far back as college—he accused Landman of racism.
^*31
It was a shrewd move: By this point, Landman’s and Howell Raines’s private resentments had spilled out into the newsroom. Gerald Boyd had also said privately that he was not fond of Landman. That spring, Bill Keller had confirmed to
The New Yorker
that had he been named executive editor, he would likely have appointed Landman as his managing editor, a pronouncement that did nothing to help soothe Landman and Boyd’s testy relationship. (In the same article, Boyd described Keller as not “inclusive”—“a word,”
The New Yorker
noted, “with deep meaning for a fifty-one-year-old black man.”) Over the next several months, as his performance worsened, Blair took two personal leaves from work. He said later he was being treated for drug and alcohol dependencies. After he returned from his second leave, two of Blair’s supervisors, Nancy Sharkey and Jeannie Pinder, devised a written plan to oversee Blair and his performance. Gerald Boyd refused to let them present Blair with the plan. It was, Boyd said, “something we had never done” and therefore could be seen as discriminatory.

By the summer of 2002, after months of shoddy work and erratic behavior, Blair orchestrated a transfer to the
Times
’s sports department. Landman warned Blair’s new supervisors about Blair’s track record. Before he moved up to his sports-department desk on the fourth floor of the Times building, Blair told national editor Jim Roberts that he was available for assignments if anything came up.

From May through October 2002, Blair wrote fifty-six stories—about two a week—along with three short squibs for the paper’s gossip column. (In the first six months of 2001, Blair wrote fifty-eight full stories in addition to fifty shorter items.) Despite his putative placement in the sports department, most of his stories continued to be filed to the metro desk, and they focused on mundane subjects like a new Con Edison substation in midtown Manhattan or a new waterfront TV tower. The vast majority of Blair’s stories appeared deep inside the
Times
’s metro section, and many of them ran only in the editions of the paper printed and distributed in the New York metropolitan area.

Blair’s correction rate also went down during this time. Later, in several conversations, Blair would say that Jon Landman was the only editor at the
Times
who realized he just needed to slow down. “In a weird way, I think he’s a real honest and honorable man,” Blair told me in the spring of 2003. “I actually have more appreciation for him, in particular for the way he helped my recovery in the beginning.”
^*32
At the time, though, he told colleagues how much he despised the metro editor. Meanwhile, Blair’s personal life seemed to be spinning out of control. He was besotted with a young intern in the
Times
’s photo department, a Polish émigré named Zuza Glowacka, with whom he was spending most of his free time. His apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, was littered with broken furniture and rotting food, according to his landlord at the time. There was fungus growing in the bathroom and mold in the kitchen. When Blair moved out that fall, the landlord, who had considered herself a friend of Blair’s, contemplated taking the young reporter to court. “It was real filth,” she said. “Imagine using a bathroom for two and a half years and never cleaning it.”

According to his own accounts and those of his friends, Blair was sleepless for days on end. For the first time in his life, he started talking about leaving journalism for good. “He was just spinning out,” says a friend of Blair’s. “Talking about how he had to kill Jayson Blair the journalist so Jayson the person could live.”

S
NIPER
T
IME

In October 2002, an unknown sniper began a murderous rampage in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, the final denouement in what had been an exhausting and bewildering year. Since September 11, the
Times
had been on overdrive, pouring money and manpower into the terrorist attacks, the war in Afghanistan, the anthrax letters, the corporate scandals roiling the country, and the threat of an invasion in Iraq. It felt as if the paper were on a war footing all the time. That pace suited Howell Raines just fine—he had no problem driving his troops hard.

What he
did
mind was getting beaten, and he was worried the
Times
was getting beaten but good on the sniper story. Howell Raines, Gerald Boyd, and national editor Jim Roberts scrambled to find reporters to parachute in and flood the zone. At the time, Raines said he and Boyd had decided to appoint Jayson Blair to the paper’s sniper coverage. After all, Blair had grown up and studied in the D.C. area and had some experience covering local law enforcement for
The Washington Post.
“This guy’s hungry,” Raines said. Neither Raines nor Boyd informed Roberts about Blair’s extensive disciplinary record or numerous corrections; Raines would later claim he hadn’t even been aware of Blair’s problems.

On October 30, six days after arriving in Maryland, Jayson Blair broke out of the pack with a front-page story that featured exclusive details about the arrest of John Muhammad. The piece was sourced to five anonymous law enforcement officials—two reportedly from Maryland and the other three from federal agencies—and said that investigators had stopped an interrogation of Muhammad under orders from the White House. Blair also wrote that Muhammad had been on the verge of explaining “the roots of his anger” when the interrogation was halted.