While all this was happening, sales of the Times did not suffer appreciably, nor did the paper lose any advertising. In fact, the Times was able to cut out the middle man: The paper made the news and reported it, but gave itself an exclusive without any reporter having to leave his desk or make a phone call. It was like a play in which one guy plays all the roles.
The Times, because of an affirmative action policy taken to absurd extremes, hired and nourished Jayson Blair, a reporter who was not only guilty of plagiary but who, in many cases, simply made up the news. He was not dumb, mind you; he figured out a way to get an exclusive story and never have to leave his apartment in Brooklyn. But the Times’s reckless pursuit of affirmative action cloaked Blair with protection from all the scrutiny to which a reporter is usually subjected.
Maybe at the Times they call it something else, but affirmative action is what it was. Howell Raines, the Times’s since-deposed executive editor, admitted that in hiring and supervising Blair, he acted “as a white man from Alabama.” What does that mean? If he acted “as a white man from Alabama” 150 years ago, Blair would have been his slave. Maybe a hundred years from now if he would act “as a white man from Alabama” he would be Blair’s slave. The point is that whether he acted “as a white man from Alabama” or an Albino from Pittsburgh, it should not have affected his judgment and behavior responsibility as top editor of the world’s leading newspaper.
While there?s no question that the Times was the perpetrator of what occurred – it was the editors’ mismanagement that was directly responsible for the Blair fiasco – the Times also played the victim. News outlets all over the world reported on how the Times (now the victim) was misled and deceived by Blair. After his resignation, the Times (the victim) acted promptly to straighten out the perpetrator (the Times) and deal with those management people who were responsible.
The Times’s real underlying problem is in its hiring practices. We have a solution. Since the people they hired to report the news were instead writing fiction, the paper should have hired a real fiction writer – Hillary Clinton.
And with Hillary, the Times wouldn’t even have to worry about any revelation of plagiarism in her past. Virtually all celebrities whose books are authored by professional writers give those writers credit, either on the cover, the title page, or both. Even most politicians are willing to credit the person who worked on their books. But not Hillary. She obviously got some poor sap who needed the money bad enough, or whose ego was beat down, to work on the book without any name credit. Since the writer never claimed authorship, he or she can never claim plagiarism.
Jayson Blair may have been so full of himself that he cared little about the people he hurt, but he could take lessons from Hillary. In her book “Living History” she claims that when her husband admitted to her that he?d lied about Monica, she angrily responded, “What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?” – even though everybody from the guard at the gate to the steward in the White House kitchen knew what was going on.