Local reporting is The Palm Beach Post’s forte, but The Post and other newspapers also rely on reporting done elsewhere. Few news sources are as prodigious as The New York Times. From November through January, The Post ran six stories on the Washington-area sniper shootings by Times reporter Jayson Blair. On Sunday, however, the Times reported that an in-house investigation had found that Mr. Blair “committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering significant news events in recent months,” including “widespread fabrication and plagiarism.”
The front-page article (“Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception”) continued on four full pages inside. Included were disturbing details on the inquiry’s finding that “various editors and reporters expressed misgivings about Mr. Blair’s skills during his five-year journey from raw intern to reporter on national news events.” The report said the mistakes by Mr. Blair, who is African-American, “became so routine, his behavior so unprofessional,” that by April 2002, the metropolitan editor told newsroom administrators: “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”
Mark Leaming of North Palm Beach raised some of the questions other Post readers are likely to be asking, starting with: “Now that the work of Jayson Blair is done at The New York Times, what are we to think of the situation he has left? He has discredited the paper and its entire staff. After reading the lame and lengthy attempt to explain what happened from Sunday’s online edition, I still don’t understand how he was allowed to keep his job after the first few times he was caught lying. Could it be that he was the poster boy for affirmative action, or that he shared the same agenda as the editorial staff? I don’t know, but it was apparently more important to the Times than the truth.”
How, Mr. Leaming asked, “will the Times deal with the consequences of all this deceit? How can they take back the emotionally charged articles that he fabricated, as the time and context when they were generated is now long gone? You can’t just post a correction to the pieces he wrote when there was all the fuss over the sniper case, or the Iraq war soldiers’ stories. The damage is already done, mostly to the families of the victims and soldiers, but more importantly, to the credibility of the paper itself. Especially when these stories are the main content of the front page of smaller newspapers all over the country.”
Post Editor Edward Sears said: “Anytime you have a relationship at least partially built on trust — and I don’t care what business it is — there is the opportunity for someone who is a liar to take advantage of you. Newspapers repair their credibility by honestly trying to correct mistakes, something The New York Times is trying to do and The Palm Beach Post tries to do.”
For Post readers wondering whether stories published here require correction, the Times detailed the problems found in 39 of the 73 articles written by Mr. Blair after he began receiving national reporting assignments in October. One of those articles, the Times said, “reported on supposed evidence from unnamed law-enforcement officers showing that (John) Malvo was the likely triggerman in most of the (sniper) shootings.” That story ran in The Post Dec. 22 on Page 7A with the headline, “Teen’s role may hinder case against older sniper suspect.”
The Times now says: “The commonwealth attorney in Fairfax County, Va., said in a recent interview that at least two of the five pieces of evidence cited in the article do not exist.” Those were a videotape said to have been recovered from a security camera near the Home Depot parking lot in Falls Church, Va., and a grape stem bearing Malvo’s saliva.
The Times also said, regarding four of the six articles that ran in The Post, that Mr. Blair had claimed a Washington, D.C., dateline when he hadn’t been there. “While that is important to the Times, and would be important to us if we thought one of our staffers had deliberately misled readers, a mistaken dateline in a wire story is not something we would normally correct,” said Post Managing Editor John Bartosek. Aside from those, he added, “One story we published had been trimmed, and the material cited by the Times as incorrect was not included in The Post’s story.”
Letter-writers should document claims that rely on statistics. Jeff Koons, a Palm Beach County commissioner and chairman of Keep Florida Beautiful’s West Palm Beach affiliate, said in his April 27 letter (“Pruitt bill would dismantle public-private cleanup effort”) that for every $1 of government money that Keep Florida Beautiful receives, the state gets back $12 in benefits. According to Commissioner Koons, “I spoke with KFB Executive Director Kim Snyder, and she says that the assertion ‘comes directly from our affiliates’ cost-benefit analyses.’ “
