Jayson Blair
| Jayson Blair | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Jayson Thomas Blair March 23, 1976 Columbia, Maryland, United States |
| Alma mater | University of Maryland, College Park |
| Occupation |
|
Jayson Thomas Blair (born March 23, 1976) is a former American journalist associated with The New York Times. He resigned from the newspaper in May 2003 in the wake of the discovery of plagiarism and fabrication in his stories.
Blair was born in Columbia, Maryland, the son of a federal executive and a schoolteacher. While attending the University of Maryland, College Park, he was a student journalist. He became editor-in-chief of its student newspaper, The Diamondback, for the 1996–1997 school year. After a summer interning at The New York Times in 1998, Blair was offered an extended internship. He declined in order to complete more coursework.
Without graduating, he returned to The New York Times in June 1999, with a year of coursework left to complete. That November, he became an "intermediate reporter."
According to a letter signed by 30 staffers in 2003, Blair made four serious errors as a reporter and editor that brought his integrity into question. The letter-signers alleged that questions about those errors were ignored by the board that owned the paper. Among the mistakes they cited was an award-winning story about a student who died of a cocaine overdose who was subsequently found to have actually died of a heart ailment.
On April 28, 2003, Blair received a call from Times national editor Jim Roberts asking him about similarities between a story he had written two days earlier and one written by San Antonio Express-News reporter Macarena Hernandez on April 18. The senior editor of the San Antonio Express-News had contacted The New York Times about the resemblance between Blair's article in The New York Times and Hernandez's article in his paper.
The resulting inquiry led to the discovery of fabrication and plagiarism in a number of articles Blair had written. Some fabrications include Blair's claims to have traveled from New York to the city mentioned in the dateline, when he did not.
Some of the suspect articles include the following:
The New York Times reported on Blair's journalistic misdeeds in an unprecedented 7,239-word front-page story on May 11, 2003, headlined "Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception." The story called the affair "a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper." On the NPR radio show Talk of the Nation, Blair explained that his fabrications started with what he thought was a relatively innocent infraction: using a quote from a press conference which he had missed. He described a gradual process whereby his ethical violations became worse and contended that his main motivation was a fear of not living up to the expectations that he and others had for his career.
...
Wikipedia