Minority Journalist’s Lament
May 30, 2003
As an Asian Pacific American journalist who writes about race, I’m still fascinated by the plateful of mush the New York Times has had to take in the face over the whole Jayson Blair affair.
Blair is the young ex-New York Times reporter who was caught lying about facts and datelines in dozens of stories. For example, he said he was in Washington when he was on a cell phone in New York. When he couldn’t be someplace to justify a dateline, he’d lift phrases wholesale from other publications.
The Times called it the lowest point in its 152-year history.
Asian Americans have always had reason to be wary of the Times’ credibility, so this was nothing new.
A few years back when the Times had its cross-hairs set to Wen Ho Lee — whom it hoped to prove was every bit a Chinese spy and threat to U.S. national security — we saw how wrong the paper could be.
The Times had to print a mea culpa that was nearly as extraordinary as the one it ran when the paper outlined Blair’s journalistic sins.
Blair’s correction ran for multiple pages on a Sunday. The Wen Ho Lee apology, on the other hand, was just one page in length during a weekday.
But it was still significant. The Times admitted it relied heavily on the government case against Lee. More importantly, the Times said it never showed a side of Lee that might have portrayed him to readers in a much fuller, human way.
Why bother, he’s only Asian Pacific American, right?
So we in the APA community already knew the Times had some problems. I know I’ve never looked at the Times the same way again.
But this Blair case was just incredible. How does a 27-year-old African American, without a college degree, make it to the top paper in the land, and then get through editors of whom the description “anal” seems inadequate?
Most critics want to blame affirmative action. They say Blair got numerous breaks just because he was black. And when he couldn’t produce under pressure he resorted to ethical shortcuts that show what happens when a company is hell bent on diversity. It’s blinding.
But that analysis is wrong.
It’s not about race. It’s just about being favored in an organization. Blair got the same protective treatment he would have if he were white and the publisher’s son. That doesn’t have to do with qualifications. Just office politics.
In fact, I’d bet whites who are favored in the organization would have been given just as many chances as Blair, if not more.
This is probably the reason why the Times had to go out of its way last week to disprove it so boldly. The paper suspended one of its most famous and heralded reporters, Rick Bragg, the heralded chronicler of poor white, for writing a story with the notes and interviews conducted by a stringer. The Times said he should have shared the byline with the stringer.
What Bragg did was common. A stringer did the leg-work, Pulitzer winner Bragg wrote it up. But all that’s verboten, especially now with the post-Blair Times.
Bragg was reportedly suspended with pay, which makes his sin even less egregious. But who better than a white Southern star for the Times to be made into an example. They’re saying, “See, our standards are so high, not only do we treat everyone equally, we eat our own Pulitzer Prize winners!”
But what a way to rebuild credibility.
The Times’ reaction shows us what kind of hit affirmative action will take in journalism.
It’s not that it was working all that great to begin with. The American Society of Newspaper Editors says newspaper newsrooms are still nearly 90 percent white.
This is after more than 25 years of affirmative action.
Minority journalists have always had to be twice as good to compete in the mainstream. Now they’ll have to be at least double that.
I wouldn’t blame affirmative action for Blair. Instead, I’d lay it on poor management decisions. For some reason they liked Blair. That’s an individual’s choice, not a function of a broad policy on race and hiring.
Frankly, based on his recent public comments, Blair has revealed himself to be a substance abuser, mentally unstable and a chronic liar. I don’t defend him.
I just hate to see detractors of affirmative action try to use Blair as the latest reason we must rid ourselves of the policy that has done more to create a solid path for APAs and other ethnic minorities to the American middle and upper-middle class.
Affirmative action works. With APAs, maybe too well, to the point where some of our groups that have been here for generations don’t need it.
But that’s still no reason to get rid of it. There are others in our Pan Asian community, notably newer immigrants from Southeast Asia who are still in need.
What I find disingenuous is the emergence of the twisted term “compassionate racism.” Conservative writers are now using the phrase to describe what liberals are guilty of when they try to show some beneficence.
In other words, it’s just flat wrong to help. Your compassion is so misguided, it’s racist!
The Times was enabling failure by promoting an unqualified black person, goes the theory.
It’s a load of fermented bean curd. Not good enough for tofu.
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