New York Times in shock as reporter's lies are uncovered

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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Just posting this story in case somebody else has not before. :slight_smile:

Was there ever any doubt that the New York Times prints such blatant lies? Just look at the Jessica Lynch story…

New York Times in shock as reporter’s lies are uncovered

A New York Times reporter has fabricated and plagiarised dozens of stories that have appeared in the paper, according to a report published on its own front page yesterday. The “frequent acts of journalistic fraud” committed by Jayson Blair “represent a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper”, it said. Blair, 27, left the paper last week after he was found to have lifted material about a dead soldier’s family from the San Antonio News Express and pretended to have been at the scene when he was not. Since then, a team of the paper’s reporters has been retracing every one of the 673 stories that Blair had filed during his four years on the Times. Yesterday the paper devoted four broadsheet pages to their latest findings. Blair had often pretended to be in places where he was not and invented information from unnamed sources on major stories, from the Washington sniper case to the Iraq war.

“It’s a huge black eye,” said Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the chairman of the New York Times Company. “It’s an abrogation of trust between the newspaper and its readers.” Blair, who is from Virginia and started on the paper as a graduate trainee, had already been warned about his reporting. Colleagues became suspicious because he seemed to cover so much ground and one of his editors said more than a year ago that he did not believe he should be writing for the Times. It transpired that Blair had often filed from New York while pretending to be at the scenes of big stories. “His tools of deceit were a cell phone and a laptop computer which allowed him to blur his true whereabouts, as well as round-the-clock access to databases of news articles from which he stole,” said yesterday’s report. Blair apparently looked at photos on the paper’s database to glean colour for stories that he would then write as if he had been at the scene when, on some occasions, he was still in the office. His report supposedly from the home of the rescued soldier Jessica Lynch describes “tobacco fields and cattle pastures” that do not exist, according to the family. Blair has declined to assist the Times in its investigation. The paper is now examining how he was able to operate for so long when so many editors expressed misgivings. The seven-person team assembled to retrace his stories has asked members of the public mentioned in them to come forward. “For now, the atmosphere of a disliked relative’s protracted wake pervades the newsroom,” the Times said.

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pair him with the iraqi information minister and start a new sitcom.

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This has got to be a height of idiocy. Malik are you seriously contending the veracity of all NY Times reporting based on actions of a rogue journalist?

The N Y Times is perhaps the preeminent news periodical in the world. It is great that they have gone and found the problem, treated it and apologized to the readers of unintended harm. You would not expect anything else from a class newspaper.

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Blair is probably going to get a real good job at the national enquirer now. alien and bigfoot stories now.

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In one of the news stories where CNN covered this issue at NYT, they also mentioned that one reason why Blair raised so high so quickly in NYT's hierarchy was also perhaps because of his ethnicity. Seems (or atleast the CNN story implied) that NYT was very anxious to promote (what they thought) a smart black journalist. At the end of the day, it backfired, and the egg was on their face, but, if true, it also raises the other issue of reverse discrimination and loweing the standards to be politically correct.

Ofcourse, the above is not the main issue at hand. At heart, it is a story of a crook. Thats about it. On the broader scale, NYT can NEVER be considered a totally unbiased news source. No news organization can EVER be COMPLETELY free of bias. NYT is for American people and hence outsiders should treat its opinions and stories with a great deal of salt, just as they do with CNN, Fox, NBC and host of other "internationally renowned" American media. Its just the way it works.

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Jayson Blair is not alone, and now several other New York Lying Times reporters are under investigation for similar offenses. The Blair scandal is summed by this sentence:-

To many critics, however, the Jayson Blair scandal is indicative of a far deeper malaise in the US press. The Times, along with other papers, they say, has allowed itself to be spoon-fed by Bush’s neo-conservative administration. ‘Since 9/11 it’s been very out of vogue to question authority,’

Crisis grows at NY Times

Credibility at risk as fraud probe widens

The crisis at one of the world’s most prestigious newspapers, the New York Times, looked set to deepen yesterday in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal after the paper conceded it was investigating the work of several other reporters. Although the Times said none of the new allegations had warranted action so far, it is fighting to stanch the wounds to its reputation after it was revealed last week that 27-year-old Blair had concocted and plagiarised dozens of stories for an institution that prides itself on accuracy and fidelity.

A spokeswoman for the paper declined to reveal the scale or nature of the allegations ‘for reasons of privacy’. Lawyers for the government have informally asked the paper’s management to provide information of Blair’s inaccuracies with a view to bringing fraud charges. Despite the Times’s efforts to restore its credibility - which included an extraordinary 14,000-word ‘apology’ for the fiasco and an acrimonious meeting between management and staff - it has succeeded only in revealing a deep disenchantment at the paper. Rumours circulating its offices suggest that executive editor Howell Raines may be forced to resign as the focus of the anger turns from Blair to him. The former star reporter, meanwhile,is reported variously as being on a suicide watch and negotiating a highly lucrative book deal. Staff accuse Raines of creating a star system that promoted favourites such as Blair while sidelining experienced reporters. They say the bastion of American journalism has been a deeply disenchanted place since Raines’s appointment in 2001. ‘It’s a chronically demoralised institution,’ said one Times reporter. ‘Reporters are by nature misanthropic and negative but it’s never been as a bad as this.’ According to the Times, Blair wrote dozens of reports purporting to be from locations across America from his home in Brooklyn - ‘interviewing’ people he never met and lifting quotes from provincial papers. His fraud - which encompassed articles about the Washington-area sniper last autumn and interviews with the families of soldiers killed in Iraq - was rumbled only after the San Antonio Express-News noticed similarities between one of its stories and Blair’s front-page article in the Times two days later.

But commentators say Blair’s manipulations do not justify the self-reproach the Times has bathed in since. ‘Everybody is loving this,’ said Vanity Fair media critic James Wolcott. ‘The Times is like the Vatican - it never shows you its inner workings.’ The paper’s fastidiousness in making tiny corrections - printing heartfelt apologies for misprinting someone’s middle initial - obscures larger failures, Wolcott said. To many critics, however, the Jayson Blair scandal is indicative of a far deeper malaise in the US press. The Times, along with other papers, they say, has allowed itself to be spoon-fed by Bush’s neo-conservative administration. ‘Since 9/11 it’s been very out of vogue to question authority,’ said Kelly McBride of the media watchdog the Poynter Institute. ‘When it does it gets railed on for being anti-American.’ ‘The Times has been living off the Pentagon papers, and the Post its Watergate legacy for 30 years,’ said Wolcott. ‘They may think those are still great medals they’re wearing but it doesn’t justify the way they’ve fallen down on the job before Bush. Nixon really did put the squeeze on the press, but this is a voluntary servitude. Both have become subservient to power.’

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Now that the war is over, and no further need for blatant propaganda, 'The NY Times' can take a higher moral ground to try and show its alleged neutrality?

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hmm… and here I thought ALL articles in NYT were fabricated :hoonh:

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When i first read this earlier this week, i assumed it was a typo - they must have been referring to the New York Post, or some other newspaper. Wouldn't be the New York Times.

**
[quote]
"Since 9/11 it's been very out of vogue to question authority," said Kelly McBride of the media watchdog the Poynter Institute. "When it does it gets railed on for being anti-American."**
[/quote]

Indeed so true.

Had the San Antonio Express-News not noticed this, i wonder how long Blair would have continued to get away with filing inaccurate news pieces?

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This problem with lies is about Racial Balancing more that about the Newspaper.

Trying to keep undereducated people in positions of capital gain (because of color or any other artificial reason) certainly puts money into that minority person's hand; but it leads to this kind of thing.

It does not solve the problem of Racial Imbalance.

Once again the media has put blinders on its readers.

Not in truth, but in trying to keep us looking away from the reason this happened.

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I don't really understand why you people are taking pleasure in this and hoping for the Times' downfall.. (at least that's the way it seems)

You all should be defending them to the extent that you can. Brush it off.. the intelligent ones amongst us could already tell where the BS lie in news. What's it matter if it's confirmed??

Now, the reason I say this is really quite practical.. if the slimebuckets that are CNN and the NYT go down, what would we be left with?? Fox News, World Tribune, etc. I ask you: Which is the greater evil? Surely the stupidity of Fox News, while mildly entertaining if tripping on flu medicine, is more damaging and damnatory than that of CNN? While the left wing hippie flakes BS all over, at least they're benign with their BS. They do it so they can fulfill the Miss America formula for world peace.. The right wing nut jobs use their BS to fulfill their historical determinism and dominate the world, because only they can do it right.

I can't stand either side of this.. but at this point in history it is best to take the side that is less damaging.

Anyway.. why doesn't anyone still talk about Geraldo or any of the journalists that stole Iraqi art??

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[QUOTE]
Originally posted by spoon:
I don't really understand why you people are taking pleasure in this and hoping for the Times' downfall.. (at least that's the way it seems)

[/QUOTE]

No one is taking "pleasure" in the downfall of the New York Lying Times, but it is revealing to see one of the leading champions of Zionism in the United States be so exposed. For it is the Zionist lobby that forms a core, if not leading part of the neo-conservative stranglehold on the white house at present. In that sense the New York Lying times is just as guilty as the liars and looters of Fox News...

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And another one…

NY Times: Pulitzer-Winning Reporter Bragg Used Unattributed Material](Yahoo News: Latest and Breaking News, Headlines, Live Updates, and More)

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^ Another reporter utilizing unattributed material ? How many are there whom we do not currently know about?

Incidentally...just wondering - but i wonder what the reaction would be were this the Guardian we were discussing, and not the NY Times. Everyone would be up in arms about how typically disingenuous and unreliable that 'communist', anti-war publication is.

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Looks like affirmative action is once again backfiring on it's biggest supporters, the liberal nytimes.