***Scroll down for updates ***
When Jayson Blair, former New York Times journalist, was exposed as a plagiarist and fabricator, he had the excuses ready.
First, he blamed affirmative action. Then he blamed a so-called bipolar disorder, writing this about himself on his web site: “Jayson Blair was a reporter at The New York Times until an untreated and undiagnosised illness, known as manic depression, brought his career down.”
Got that? His illness “brought down his career.”
Despite Blair’s history of fakery and excuse-making, the powers that be at a magazine about bipolar disorders has decided to publish a first-person account of his experiences, according to the Boston Herald. Says the editor about the article, “It went through a very rigorous editing process. We just have a very rigorous editing process and a great deal of fact checking.”
I’ll bet!
The Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal was before my blogging time, but I remember how dumb I thought he was for being so blatantly careless. This guy pretended to be in different cities writing and filing stories and going so far as to submit phony expense reports. He covered the D.C. sniper case extensively, but the prosecutor said “60 percent of a story written by Blair…was inaccurate,” according to Online NewsHour.
Although Blair was an error-prone reporter with bad work habits, he was promoted. The editors who failed to get rid of him because he was black quit in disgrace.
Blair was indeed an affirmative action hire, and ironically, blamed his treachery on this fact. Affirmative action is an unnecessary distraction. As long as it exists, people will question the credentials and abilities of blacks. And as long as it exists, blacks like Jayson Blair will use it to try to get themselves out of trouble.
Read a bit about the Blair affair:
- More Reporting By Times Writer Called Suspect
- The Seven Faces of Jayson Blair
- How did he bamboozle the New York Times?
- Don’t Blame It on Jayson Blair
- The Jayson Blair Affair
- Jayson Blair: A Case Study of What Went Wrong at The New York Times
- The making of Jayson Blair
- Jayson Blair says NYT still lax
- The forbidden truth about Jayson Blair
- Q&A: Jayson Blair
- Top New York Times editors quit
Wow. All that press just for being a phony. 
Addendum: More at Malkin.
Update: Skin-deep diversity angst at CBS. As you read the article, consider my previous statement: “Affirmative action is an unnecessary distraction.”
