Report: The Meltdown of Jayson Blair

Senior writer Seth Mnookin and a team of correspondents tell the compelling and unvarnished story of Jayson Blair who has singlehandedly embarrassed and stained the reputation of an American institution.

As the showdown unfolded this week between the Times top executives and the newspaper staff, Blair was holed up in a Manhattan apartment, talking with his lawyers and his literary agent. The week before, friends say, Blair checked himself out of an inpatient hospital where he had been receiving treatment for a history of alcoholism, cocaine abuse and manic depression.

Newsweek recounts Blair’s troubled times during his tenure as editor of the college newspaper at the Univ. of Maryland through to an accelerated, inevitable meltdown towards the end of his apparently tortuous odyssey:

“Whatever transpired with his editors, friends say Blair was melting down… Over the next several months, Blair continued to get high-profile assignments from the Times, writing about the families of missing American soldiers and staying on the sniper story…

“Unable to locate his own boundaries, Blair tried to become like the people around him. Writing about sexual abuse, he claimed he himself was a victim. ‘When the shuttle blew up, he said his dad worked at NASA,’ said one Times reporter. ‘When [Gov. George] Ryan pardoned all the prisoners on death row in Illinois, [Blair] said he had a relative on death row’…

“This spring, Blair pushed his deceptions to the breaking point,” says the NewsWeek report. “Staggering under the pressure of his national assignments, he stopped traveling on assignment, using his cell phone and laptop to make it seem as if he was jetting around the country. At times, he was writing from inside the paper’s newsroom…

“In late April, he plagiarized a story from the San Antonio Express-News. When confronted about the charge, Blair resigned rather than produce receipts proving he had, in fact, traveled to Texas. For the week following Blair’s resignation, the scandal at the Times was a kind of low hum in the nation’s newsrooms.

"But the Times’ four-page report, printed on May 11, turned that hum into an all-consuming roar. Instead of answering questions about how Blair had been able to get away with so much for so long, the consensus in the newsroom was that the Times story skirted around many of the major issues -- the role of race in Blair’s hiring and promotions; the lack of communication -- and in some cases, acrimony -- between desk editors at the Times; the imperious tenure of Howell Raines, and the institutional arrogance that led the paper to highhandedly correct the smallest errors while never bothering to address much larger thematic concerns about some articles…

“Blair, meanwhile, knows his career in journalism is over,” concludes the Newsweek report. “When asked if his life had become unraveled in the past year, one of Blair’s friends said, ‘It was never raveled. He was going to self-destruct, and he had to choose between killing himself physically or killing the thing that was causing him so much pain, his love of journalism.’

“But he is still working the angles. Blair has signed up with David Vigliano, a literary agent, and is in talks for book, movie and television deals….”

As Newsweek points out through the words of Ted Faraone, a PR agent who had worked with Blair on stories at the Times:

“'If one thing can be said about this from a literary standpoint, the American people tend to be very forgiving if you come clean. They’ll watch the TV movie and pay $9.50 to see the feature film. It’s a strange commentary on celebrity in 21st-century America, but in a way that’s kind of how we rehabilitate people after they’ve fallen.'”