Quote Originally Posted by Adrian II View Post
Ah, the convenient world view (if you can call it that) of the bloggista. The blogosphere doesn't recognize anymore that people have ideas or opinions, nor that they make genuine mistakes. In the blogosphere everyone only has 'agendas'.

AII
Ah, you got me! I do read a number of blogs religiously. Here they are, in all their evil-opinion-warping splendor. I'll never drive a crappy GM product again after reading about their poor production standards.

Give me a break. I get my news mostly from Google these days because it offers such a variety of sources for the same stories. The only time I ever encounter political blogs is when I'm looking for old links to mainstream sources that have fallen out of Google News.

Jayson Blair was not a brilliant fraudster, and the incident was not a genuine mistake; it was the product of a dysfunctional - and yes, agenda driven - culture in the newsroom that originated from the highest levels of the organization. Blair was recognized as a poor and often fraudulent journalist long before he was given tenure at the Times, but he was promoted over and over again because of his race, not his skills.

Jayson Blair joined The New York Times summer internship program in June 1998 after a Times recruiter visited the University of Maryland where Blair was editor-in-chief of the school's independent student newspaper, The Diamondback.

According to Times staff, Blair was a promising and talented writer who had previously interned at The Boston Globe and at The Washington Post. Because of his performance as an intern over the first summer, the paper's editors asked him to return the following year.

Blair advanced quickly, not only because of his skill but, according to findings of an internal report commissioned after the incident by Times editors, because he may have become favored as part of a "star system" that advanced some reporters close to then-executive editor Howell Raines.

After four years in the internship program and as a junior reporter, where, at times, he made more mistakes than any other reporter in the paper's Metro section, Blair was given a full-time reporting position.

"He was given a regular tenured reporting job despite the misgivings of his immediate boss," the report said of Blair. "He was put on high-profile national assignments with his new supervising editors receiving no notice of the serious problems that had marked periods in his previous four years at the newspaper."

Blair's editor Jonathan Landman told the Siegal committee -- a committee of 25 staffers and three outside journalists led by assistant managing editor Allan Siegal -- he felt the fact that Blair was African-American played a large part in his initial promotion to full-time staffer.

"I think race was the decisive factor in his promotion," he said. "I thought then and I think now that it was the wrong decision."

After several more mistakes, poor evaluations and a period of leave during which Blair was said to be dealing with "personal problems," a memo sent by Landman, warned management "to stop Jayson from writing for The New York Times. Right now."

The memo resulted in a short suspension from deadline writing but failed to get Blair fired. In 2002, Blair was promoted to the national desk to cover the Washington, D.C.-area sniper shootings, according to the report released by the Siegal committee.

"The Blair thing was complicated but at its simplest, he worked for our Metro desk and they knew some of his problems and when he was transferred to the National desk, they weren't made aware," Siegal told the Online NewsHour.

Blair wrote 52 stories during the sniper attacks. In one instance, Fairfax County, Va., prosecutor Bob Horan claimed that 60 percent of a story written by Blair, in which he was quoted, was inaccurate.

Despite such accusations and a slew of corrections the paper was forced to make in the wake of his reporting, Blair continued to cover critical stories for the Times, moving from the sniper attacks to national coverage of the Iraq war.

"That national berth for sniper coverage enabled him to slide into military coverage of military families on the home front of the war in Iraq," the Siegel report said. "It was on the home front stories, in March and April 2003, that Blair committed the egregious plagiarism and fabrications that landed like a bomb on The New York Times."

A review of Blair's time on the National desk found that on many occasions when Blair should have been on assignment out-of-state, he was in fact e-mailing or speaking to his editors from his Brooklyn apartment or from another floor of The Times office building.
Howell Raines didn't even deny it.

Before opening the session to questions, Mr. Raines made a pre-emptive attempt to address whether Mr. Blair's race — he is black — had played a role in his being added last fall to the team covering the hunt for the snipers in the Washington area.

Only six months earlier, Mr. Blair, 27, had been found to be making so many serious errors as a reporter on the metropolitan staff that he had been informed that his job was in jeopardy.

"Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts he appeared to be a promising young minority reporter," Mr. Raines said. "I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities."

"Does that mean I personally favored Jayson?" he added, a moment later. "Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes."
Is this reflective of your idea of an 'enviable', top quality news organization? Take those rose tinted glasses off, my friend.

Now, I read the Old Gray Lady quite a bit because their stories are featured so frequently in Google's news stream, and they are generally well researched, high quality pieces. However, I am very leery to heap undue adoration and "envy of the world" monikers on any news source, as they all have their own biases, blinders, and agendas. The poor journalistic standards, poor management, and out-of-step personal agendas that were put on display just a few years ago during the Blair incident make it especially difficult for me to swallow your conclusion. Spiegel, maybe?