Hard News (18 page)

The piece caused an immediate uproar. Reporters and editors in the
Times
’s Washington bureau raised questions about Blair’s story even before it ran—how was it, they asked, that a green metro reporter was able to land multiple anonymous law enforcement sources on one of the most hotly contested stories of the year? What’s more, the D.C. bureau’s own reporting indicated Muhammad hadn’t been talking about anything like “the roots of his anger” but was instead discussing mundane details of his confinement, such as when he’d be allowed a shower.

“We had sources waving us away from that,” says Jill Abramson. She called Jim Roberts in New York, and the story was changed to reflect dissent in the reporting. The Washington bureau’s reporters were still not thrilled with the story, which now contained as many caveats as it did assertions.

“When I read that first story, I remember thinking, Holy cow, could this really be him?” says David Barstow, a forty-year-old investigative reporter who sat next to Blair in metro when the two first joined the paper in 1999. “I assumed he got the byline because he got the first tip or something. But everyone knew there’s no way some reporter could just wander into that situation and get three federal law enforcement sources and two state sources right away. It would be an extraordinary thing even for the most extraordinary reporter. It wasn’t just his age, but the arc of his career. There was no history of that type of reporting.”

After Blair’s story ran, the U.S. Attorney from Maryland and an FBI official issued public statements refuting parts of the story. Within days,
The Washington Post
was running multiple articles picking apart central components of Blair’s piece. In the media dustup that followed, Blair told Erik Wemple at the
Washington City Paper,
“The
Post
got beat in their own back yard, and I can understand why they would have sore feelings.”
Times
reporters cringed at Blair’s statements; his showboating went against protocol at the
Times,
where reporters let their work speak for itself.

Howell Raines, however, told colleagues he had no problem with Blair’s comments. And indeed, at no time during the furor over Blair’s reporting did Raines or Boyd ask Blair to tell them who his anonymous law enforcement sources were. Furthermore, even after complaints were made about his work, no one told Jim Roberts or other editors on the
Times
’s national desk about Blair’s disturbing track record. Instead, incredibly, Raines sent Blair an e-mail, which he also forwarded to a broad group of editors, including Jim Roberts, Jon Landman, and Jill Abramson, praising Blair for his work. “Jayson,” Raines wrote, “I should have already emailed to congratulate you on that great scoop in Wednesday’s paper. The Post’s follow up merely served to confirm the strength of your sources. This is great shoe-leather reporting and especially impressive because you were dropped in the middle of a very big running story being covered by scores of other reporters. I am very impressed and most grateful. All best, Howell.”

Raines’s memo was viewed as much as a thinly veiled message to Landman and Abramson as it was an “attaboy” to Blair. “I interpreted it as, ‘Fuck you, Washington bureau, with your scaredy-cat jealous reporters who shoot down someone else’s story because they can’t get their own,’ ” says Abramson.

Later, Blair’s editor on the sniper stories, Nick Fox, said he would have felt much more wary of Blair’s work if he had been warned in advance. “I can’t imagine accepting unnamed sources from him as the basis of a story had we known what was going on,” he said. “If somebody had said, ‘Watch out for this guy,’ I would have questioned everything that he did. I can’t imagine being comfortable with going with the story at all, if I had known that the metro editors flat out didn’t trust him.” But instead of warnings, the editors were being given every indication that Blair was a favorite of the paper’s top editors and, moreover, trustworthy. At one point, according to several people in the newsroom, Boyd walked by the
Times
’s metro desk holding one of Blair’s front-page exclusives. “See?” Boyd said. “At least national knows how to get good work out of this guy.”

Less than two months later, another Blair exclusive would receive public rebuke. In a December 22 front-page story, Blair wrote that all the evidence in the sniper case indicated that teenage suspect Lee Malvo was the triggerman in the shootings. Again, all of Blair’s sources were anonymous. Again, a prosecutor publicly denounced the report. This time, Raines checked Blair’s reporting by comparing what he had written against what had appeared in
The Washington Post
and, not finding any major discrepancies, decided his reporting was solid. (This hadn’t always been Raines’s modus operandi. The previous February, business reporter Gretchen Morgenson had written a story about Enron that detailed how the company was a house of cards built on the momentum of a constantly rising stock price. The piece contained one crucial anonymous source. Upon reading the piece, Raines demanded Morgenson tell him the source’s identity. Morgenson, who had promised she wouldn’t reveal the source’s identity under any circumstances, refused, and Raines spiked the story. Two months later, Morgenson won a Pulitzer Prize for her subsequent Enron coverage, and for the next two years, Glenn Kramon, Morgenson’s editor, carried her spiked story around with him in his briefcase. “I couldn’t throw it away,” he says. “It was so good. And—this is totally irrational—I kept thinking, I’ll get it in the paper someday.”)

Blair was not just
covering
the snipers’ trial. He was increasingly identifying with Lee Malvo, the teenage suspect. Within months, Blair was circulating drafts of a book proposal on the sniper story in which he discussed his own anger and frustration as an African American. “Zuza [Glowacka] encouraged me to look for answers about the history of violence in my own family and that of Lee Malvo, suggesting the search would not be in vain, if it at least ended my restless angst,” Blair wrote. “The observations about the present day criminal justice system and the historical context are what sets this work apart, giving it a broad appeal to all those interested in uncovering this rare blend of shattered dreams and violence that is endemic in our society.”

Over the next several months, Blair continued to get high-profile assignments from the
Times,
writing about the families of missing American soldiers and the unfolding sniper story. He also was becoming more entwined with Glowacka, the daughter of a Polish friend of Raines’s Polish wife. Several of the people closest to Blair during this time remarked later that Blair was something of a chimera; seemingly unable to develop a core personality of his own, he instead tried to become like the people around him. In college, while writing about sexual abuse, he suddenly and publicly claimed he himself was a victim. When the space shuttle blew up, he said his father worked at NASA. When Illinois governor George Ryan pardoned all the prisoners on death row in his state, Blair said his uncle was on death row. After September 11, of course, he said he had had a cousin in the Pentagon. And when Howell Raines married a Polish woman, Jayson Blair found a Polish girlfriend.

That spring, Blair pushed his deceptions to the breaking point. In his 2004 memoir,
Burning Down My Masters’ House,
Blair would describe himself during this period as being “fully psychotic.” Staggering under the pressure of his national assignments, he stopped traveling for work and instead used his cellphone and laptop to make it seem as if he were jetting around the country. At times, he was writing from inside the paper’s newsroom when he was supposed to be hundreds of miles away.

Instead of his usual manic self, Blair was outwardly calm, even listless. Roberts says he went out to lunch with Blair in March, two years after Blair had been hired on the
Times
full-time, to discuss the young reporter’s goals. “He did not seem to have any strong desires,” Roberts says. The national editor met with Blair again in early April 2003. “He seemed even more distracted, and I remember telling other people I thought that was a bit odd, because he had been so ambitious before.”

To some members of the
Times
’s newsroom, Blair’s April 26, 2003, front-page story on the family of missing army sergeant Edward Anguiano was seen as further proof of the maturation of a once troubled reporter—it was elegantly written, with fluid transitions and nuanced turns of phrase.
^*33
Several of Blair’s fellow reporters sent him e-mails praising his work. To more than one, Blair responded with a description of how emotionally draining it was to interview a woman whose son was, in all likelihood, dead.

R
ESIGNATION

After being summoned by Jim Roberts on April 29, Blair went to the
Times
’s headquarters on Forty-third Street. He brought reporter’s notebooks containing what he said were his notes from Los Fresnos. “I was still wondering, Is it sloppiness? Is it plagiarism?” says Roberts. “But in those first twenty-four hours, even in my wildest imagination I wouldn’t have conceived that he didn’t go to San Antonio.”

Already, Blair was changing his story. On Monday, he insisted he had never seen Macarena Hernandez’s piece. By Tuesday, he said he had seen a version of it. Actually, Blair said, he’d downloaded it onto his computer and had simply gotten his notes mixed up. Blair told Roberts he was exhausted, and perhaps he had been trying to do too much. As Blair was talking with Jim Roberts, Robert Rivard of the
Express-News
checked with Hernandez to see if anyone from the
Times
had gotten in touch with her about her complaint. No one besides Blair himself had. No one had contacted Rivard, either, or anyone else at the
Express-News,
even just to say they were looking into the situation. After his experience in 1999 with the
Times
and his paper’s Madalyn Murray O’Hair story, Rivard knew he had to do something.

“Many people in my newsroom were already on edge because of that situation,” Rivard says. In 1999, the first time Rivard had been on the receiving end of an apparent non-attribution, he had written a letter to Bill Keller, then the
Times
’s managing editor. “We believe your Houston reporter . . . has made improper use of material without attribution from an article written by a
San Antonio Express-News
reporter,” Rivard wrote. Looking back at the two pieces, it’s hard to understand why there was so much frustration over this one story. The
Times
account went out of its way to credit the
Express-News
’s reporting for serving as the impetus for reopening the investigation into O’Hair’s disappearance. But Rivard, and
Express-News
reporters, were undoubtedly responding to the accumulated frustration of feeling as if they were nothing more than a bottomless well of story ideas for the country’s national papers. What’s more, the
Times
story did unquestionably use one quote, without attribution, that had been printed only in the
Express-News.

A week later, Keller wrote back. “Having reported for a couple of regional papers,” he wrote, “I understand the feeling of reporters there that when they have a good story, the bigshot press pays them no respect. Perhaps some such feeling has made you a little thin-skinned in this case. . . . Whatever’s going on, I don’t see that we owe you an editor’s note.”

Rivard was offended, but he let the issue drop. “Hearst [the corporate owner of the
Express-News
] doesn’t have me here to pick industry fights with
The New York Times,
” he says. But this time, Rivard vowed, the outcome would be different: “I wasn’t going to let this end the way the last one ended.” That afternoon, Rivard began composing a formal complaint to Gerald Boyd and Howell Raines. He also decided to go on the record with
The Washington Post
’s Howard Kurtz. “It’s not quite plagiarism,” Rivard told Kurtz, “nor is it as simple as an error of non-attribution. It’s definitely a problem of presenting previously published material without an appropriate acknowledgment.” Around the same time, Rivard got a call from Erik Wemple, the editor of the
Washington City Paper,
an alternative weekly. Wemple, who had written about the minicontroversies surrounding Blair’s coverage of the D.C.-area sniper case the previous fall, had also been tipped off to the similarities between Blair’s and Hernandez’s stories. When Rivard got off the phone with Wemple, he finished his e-mail to the
Times
editors and sent it out at 5:00 p.m., eastern standard time.

Kurtz, meanwhile, had reached Jayson Blair on his cellphone. “The first words out of his mouth were, ‘I really fucked up, man,’ ” says Kurtz. “He was very smooth. He immediately pled guilty to a limited offense—mixing up his notes. He says he can’t be quoted, but explains the situation to me, one reporter to another, saying, ‘Look, I’m not going to defend myself.’ I wasn’t completely buying his explanation.” Kurtz was aware of Blair’s sniper stories because of the small ruckus they caused in the
Post
’s newsroom, but he hadn’t ever dealt with the reporter before. “The notes excuse, that’s the first refuge of every plagiarist. And besides that, there was more that was similar than just the quotes. It wasn’t adding up.”