The yellow line of culprits complicit in Jayson Blair’s betrayal of a once proud profession stretches from the Times newsroom into its innermost corporate soul.
In this era of fixation upon personality it’s inconceivable the laser focus of public attention would not go homing instantaneously for that bogus journalist.
It didn’t take the Times top management long after being caught with their pants down off Times Square to zoom in on Blair, devoting page after page, beginning with the front, to his manifold transgressions. Look, everyone! We’ve exposed the intruder in our woodpile.
With as phony a
Executive Editor Howell Raines, who is indeed responsible for having reduced the Times to a laughing stock during his suzerainty, acknowledged the obvious, then magnanimously declined a suggestion from a newsroom inferior that he hand in his resignation.
This tells you something about the rotten-cheese environment that has ripened over the years and now finally putrefied on Raines’ watch. At any other institution, private or public (with the exception of the Clinton White House) the officer in charge would have left, head bowed in disgrace. In Japan they lay out special knives for such occasions.
Not Raines. He was too big a man to deprive the Times of his principled guidance in such a stormy sea.
And what kind of gelatinous publisher is it who wouldn’t fire such a pathetic editor? Instead, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. says he’d reject a Raines resignation.
But, in a larger sense, Raines was exactly right. He shouldn’t have handed in his resignation. Why indeed should he?
He embodies all that has become so tragically wrong about what was a very good newspaper once upon a time long, long ago. If Raines were to crawl off someplace and hide, never to venture near another newspaper again, the Times would still be the Times.
What Raines has done these past several years to the Times, amid the coterie of sycophants he so adroitly recruited, will never be fully expunged from the consciousness of newspaper readers worldwide.
If the Times owners think for one minute anyone will readily forget this disgrace – “put it behind us and move on,” in the psychology of their favorite ex-president – they are even more out of touch with America than their news and editorial columns have come to proclaim.
If it were just a case of one little Jayson Blair, making up stories and quotes and getting caught at least half-a-hundred times, then there might be some hope for the Times somewhere down the road.
But too much that is insufferably wrong with the Times’ misconception of what constitutes journalism has been woven into the warp and the woof of that publication.
It’s not been a simple betrayal. Here are but some of the devils that contributed to the Times’ downfall:
The very notion that a writer or editor might be able to get away – repeatedly! – with make-believe stories is as foreign to the traditional newsroom as skunks strolling into a picnic.
If there are degrees to arrogance, overweening is the only proper adjective for that which permeates the Times.
Once permitted to raise its ugly head in any newsroom and then endure, there is no stopping it. If it’s all right for Blair to file fraudulent copy, then why isn’t it for everyone else on the payroll?
Having reached that stage of malignancy, it swiftly metastasizes into a newsroom-wide competition to see who can get away with the most the most often. If the Times’ damage-control geniuses think their troubles started and ended with one jerk reporter, they need to think again.
These are – or, rather, they once were – the inviolable rules of the game drilled into the skulls of cub reporters:
No anonymous sources. If you can’t find anyone who will stand up and be quoted, keep on digging till you do. If that fails, you have no story.
No single-sourcing. Hand in no story until you’ve looked in all 360 degrees and done justice to every relevant point of view.
Manufacture no quote. The source either said it or didn’t. You are not the source. You are the reporter. You got that?
Check and then check again for accuracy on each fact you report. If you cannot verify it independently it’s not to be reported as a fact.
Wear out your shoe leather. Hanging around the newsroom, slumped in front of a computer monitor or substituting phone calls for eyeball-to-eyeball interviews won’t cut it. Go to work; it very possibly may not kill you.
This is what Raines and his editor corps did, day after day, with the news columns of the Times.
They were not content to report what actually was. They had to try to make the news come out the way they wanted things to be.
Readers have a right to know what is fiction, what is fact. The dirtiest trick of dirty journalism is to con readers into thinking they’re reading something that’s so when you damn well know it’s not.
This is the intellectual dishonesty that finally toppled the Times off its high horse.
It’s bad journalism – in fact, it’s not journalism at all – to pump out political poppycock in the guise of news.
Nothing wrong with a newspaper having an editorial bias. That’s the prerogative of the ownership of publications under the First Amendment. But it must be kept in the editorial, not the news, columns. That much is owed to readers.
It was the leftist bias of Howell Raines and pals that gave them what they had come to believe was their journalistic entitlement – a presumed right to make the news appear as they would have news be if they were God.
Well, at the New York Times they were gods. Now those idols – and they have worshipers on other newspapers all across this land – have crumbled under their own weight of hubris.
Those pseudo journalists at the Times would never have thought they could get away with violating the basic rules of genuine journalism had it not been for their political prejudice – and the arrogance that transports it.
It has now become a tenet of elitist journalism that anything goes so long as it advances its agenda, and the agenda of the Times has been to make itself the bible of the radical left.
Jayson Blair, sorry an excuse for a journalist as he was, is not what was wrong with the New York Times.
The New York Times remains what’s wrong with the New York Times.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.