Early evening Saturday, May 10, 2003, a white SUV with the Times’ logo doubled-parked in front of my home, and the driver dropped off an early edition of the Sunday newspaper that changed my life. Usually, I looked to the early edition to raise questions or suggest improvements before the final edition of the paper’s largest issue of the week is printed. It seemed that editing the Times never stopped. Sulzberger Jr. once summarized this process with the quip, “You can read the paper or you can edit the paper, but you can’t do both.”

This time as I pulled away the string that bound the sections, I did so as a reader. My eyes quickly found the story, above the fold, in the upper-left corner of the front page:

“Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception,” the headline proclaimed.

The article said an investigation by Times journalists found that the twenty-seven-year-old (Jayson) Blair committed “frequent acts of journalistic fraud” while covering major news events in recent months. It described how Blair made up facts and sources and submitted reports that were assumed to be from Maryland, Texas, and other states where he was dispatched, when instead he was often in New York, stealing material from other news organizations and using details from photographs to suggest that he was on the scene. It said his fabrication and plagiarism represented “a profound betrayal of trust and a low point” in the paper’s 152-year history. In news parlance, the piece was a bombshell, the sort of story that I had written or edited countless times. But this bombshell was personal. I wanted to tuck the paper away, as if doing so would make everything it revealed vanish. At the same time, I wanted to read every word and then read each one again.

Good times with Zachary

Photo courtesy of the family

Boyd met Robin Stone, a journalist, during a recruiting trip after he joined The Times’ management. They were married in 1996 and had a son, Zachary.

Robin would be home from Brazil the next morning, so Zachary and I were there alone. The moment felt surreal. Zach went about his business with no care in the world, while ten feet away, his father wore a look of immense pain as he devoured the newspaper spread across the kitchen table.

I braced myself as I turned to the jump page. To hear that a story is running four pages can be jarring, but to see it was misery. I turned back to the front and kept reading. Paragraphs, sentences, and words leaped off the page. Some I agreed with, and some I disputed. Some information I was learning for the first time, which made me even angrier about having reporters conduct the investigation instead of managers and editors, as I’d suggested.

The article described how various editors and reporters had expressed concern about errors and unprofessional behavior during the span of Blair’s five-year Times career from intern to reporter on the National desk, so much so that (editor Jonathan) Landman was compelled to send his “stop Jayson from writing for the Times” e-mail. It said that after Blair had been “sternly warned” that his job was in jeopardy and that after he returned from a leave of absence for personal problems, Raines and I “guided” him to the National desk, where he was assigned to the high-profile Washington, D.C., sniper case. It then quoted Sulzberger Jr., who called the damage to the paper and its employees “a huge black eye.”

I did not need to read further. The thousands of words could be reduced to those salient facts. Blair had always been a problem, one editor had sounded a desperate warning, and the publisher was outraged. The rest was background noise.

As I waited for my wife, I spent the early Sunday hours in a mental fog. I watched television as the article became the biggest news of the day. Uninformed speculation had already settled in by the time I heard Newsweek’s Seth Mnookin on Howard Kurtz’s CNN program Reliable Sources.

“Well, I think one of the interesting things that has yet to come out is Jayson’s sort of mentoring relationship with some people very high up at the Times, including Gerald Boyd, the managing editor,” he said, adding that the story “sort of” suggested such a relationship.

I had been indicted by a journalist and was about to be convicted.

the basics

 

'My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at the New York Times’

 

By Gerald M. Boyd, Robin D. Stone (Afterword)

 

List price: $26.95
Publication date: Feb. 01
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
432 pages

There was never a mentoring relationship. But once again, because a white man was both my judge and jury, nobody doubted his assertions. Before the week was over, thanks to the power of the Internet and the laziness of many reporters, Mnookin’s lies were recycled repeatedly.

...

It is hard to explain my sense of loneliness at that time. It was not hopelessness, because there is always hope. But I realized that I was fighting to preserve a reputation that had taken a lifetime to amass — while friends remained quiet and foes offered lies—and that brought a feeling of isolation that I had never before felt.

...Later ... I hosted a meeting in the Times’ boardroom as one of the two national cochairmen of the University of Missouri School of Journalism’s major fundraising drive. Those assembled were prominent j-school graduates, some of the most successful names in journalism.

When I had agreed to serve as a cochair, I expressed concern about having time to meet the demands of such a role. Yet over the months, I warmed to it and developed a strong relationship with Dean Mills, the j-school’s dean, and others in the development office.

Weeks before, I had eagerly volunteered the Times as a place that could draw a good crowd. Now I was welcoming the group to the paper two days after it raised questions about my abilities as a manager. I felt embarrassed and uncomfortable. Perhaps that explained my comments when the session started. Participants were asked to share with the group what a j-school education meant to them and their careers.

When my turn came, I fought back tears.

I recalled how I took the Greyhound bus to Columbia with almost everything I owned and how the years on campus changed my life. The road I traveled would not have been possible without Missouri, and I would always be grateful. By then, others in the room appeared near tears. It was a bonding moment that comes from the stark nakedness when there is nothing to hide. I ended with the words of a professor that had stayed with me through my career.

“A journalist should only write what he knows in his heart to be true,” I said. “Maybe if Jayson Blair would have gone to Missouri ... maybe he would have learned that.”