May 19, 2003
More On Blair
Just a few days ago, I wrote that had Jayson Blair tried to pull off the level of fraud that he achieved in the newsroom of the New York Times on the paper's Sports desk, he would have been found out in a New York minute.
In the current issue of Newsweek, I couldn't help but notice this passage in their cover story on Blair that concerned his tenure on the campus paper at the University of Maryland:
But while Blair was charming the powerful adults, he was alienating virtually everyone he worked with on The Diamondback, the student newspaper he would eventually run. His tenure as editor was marked by strife, allegations of racism, problematic stories and fantastical tales. “When Jayson was initially hired, people were really upset,” Danielle Newman told NEWSWEEK. Newman was an editor under Blair, and succeeded him after he resigned. “We said we just didn’t think he was qualified,” Newman said. There were concerns about a football game Blair covered—his story was filled with quotes from people another reporter at the game wasn’t sure existed.
For all the talk about how "soft" Sports coverage is considered by the high priests of journalism, it ought to be pretty clear by now that it's awfully hard to fake without setting off alarm bells.
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I've always thought that one of the big problems with sports journalism has been the over-reliance on blind sourcing. Jayson Blair could have easily duped most of the sports editors in this country by simply planting false "background" quotes in his articles.
Posted by:
at May 19, 2003 02:13 PM
Blind sourcing isn't just a problem on the sports page, it's a problem in newsrooms in general. What I was pointing out here was Blair's general inability to bother even with the basics of getting a story right -- something that apparently included fabricating people out of thin air inside a locker room.
Do this even once while covering a pro sports team in New York, and you'd be finished.
Posted by:
at May 19, 2003 05:21 PM
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