The Public Editor: Repairing the Credibility Cracks After Jayson Blair

Jayson Blair, a young Times reporter, lied and faked and cheated his way through story after story — scores of them, for years. He fabricated sources, plagiarized material from other publications, and pretended to be places he never went. The problem, once fully investigated and made public by The Times itself, brought down not only the reporter but also The Times’s executive editor and managing editor. For a while, it even made The Times a laughingstock in late-night comedy routines.

“I think of Jayson Blair as an accident that ended my newspaper career in the same unpredictable way that a heart attack or a plane crash might have,” Howell Raines, that executive editor, wrote a year later in a long, fascinating piece for The Atlantic. Last week, when I interviewed him by phone, Mr. Raines made a similar comparison: “It was like stepping on a land mine.” The result, he said, “was heartbreaking for me.”

It was also, as the publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., put it, “a huge black eye” for The Times. Glenn Kramon, who was the business editor at the time and helped in the paper’s exhaustive investigation of Mr. Blair’s wrongdoings, remembers just how brutal that period was: “I didn’t realize how bad things had become until the P.R. guy from Enron called to tell us to hang in there.” And he remembers the emotions: “I felt anger on behalf of the 400 or so scrupulous, dedicated reporters who were incapable of such behavior.”

Much has happened since, and The Times is in its second round of new editorial leadership. But even now, when newspaper companies are preoccupied with long-term survival, it is still a touchy subject.

After the scandal and a thorough internal analysis, Times management put safeguards in place. One was the role of the public editor — I am the fifth — to give readers a direct place, independent of The Times’s editing structure, to take complaints about journalistic integrity. Another was the creation of a full-time standards editor, an internal position within the newsroom hierarchy. Still another was a program to thoroughly and regularly evaluate journalists’ work.

But, despite all of this, could a similar episode — or something as damaging — happen again?

“You have to always believe that something awful could happen again,” the executive editor, Jill Abramson, told me last week. Both she and the managing editor, Dean Baquet, pointed out that the particulars of the Blair problems — repeated fabrication and lying in articles — would come to the surface much more quickly in the age of blogging and Twitter.

“The world is better at checking us and challenging us,” Mr. Baquet said. “But it would be arrogant to say something couldn’t happen.”

Though plagiarism and fabrication remain a worry for editors, more likely these days is a problem that could arise from the misuse of social media, in which journalists have unfiltered, unedited publication channels. And beyond the actions of individual journalists, The Times faces previously unimagined risks to its credibility as it experiments with new ways to replace advertising revenue, which continues to shrink. For instance, the company has said that it will run more events like last year’s DealBook conference, in which outsiders pay to attend, allowing them unusal access to Times journalists. Such events are relatively harmless — certainly not sins on the order of the Blair scandal — but the meshing of journalism and moneymaking raises the potential for conflict-of-interest trouble.

Ms. Abramson said that one of the greatest lessons of the Blair scandal was “how concerned, hurt and angry our readers were, because this was contrary to everything we stand for — the trust and authenticity that people attach to The Times.”

Clyde Haberman, the celebrated reporter and columnist who retired recently, called the episode “without question the worst period in my 36 years at the paper.” As bad as it was, though, he said that it underlined for him a continuing virtue of the journalistic world: the importance of trust between reporter and editor, and between the paper and its readers.

“Trust is the coin of our realm,” he said. “We trust that the people we interview are being straight with us. We trust that our confidential sources are decent folks. We trust that our reporters went to the places they say they went, and spoke with the people they say they met. Naturally, trust doesn’t mean blind faith. Trust but verify, as Ronald Reagan said in a different context. But generally speaking, we are no different from anyone else on this planet: We accept that the people we deal with, and work with, are honorable.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/public-editor/repairing-the-credibility-cracks-after-jayson-blair.html?partner=rss&emc=rss