The Jayson Blair stigma
It seems like everyone and his grandpa have asked me about Jayson Blair — the young, black New York Times reporter recently outed as a serial fabricator and plagiarizer.
The prevailing take on the latest journalistic scandal — “a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper,” the Times lamented — is that it is an indictment of the newspaper’s affirmative action policy.
I agree, but not for the reasons that many advance: that the Times had no business hiring a twentysomething black to its reporting staff.
I joined The Wall Street Journal editorial page when I was in my early 20s. My tender age, my relative inexperience, my complexion, hardly predisposed me to journalistic fraud. About the same time I was hired by the Journal, my college classmate Isabel Wilkerson was hired by the Times, a twentysomething black reporter. She later won a Pulitzer Prize for her feature writing in 1994.
So, there’s nothing wrong with newspapers, newsmagazines or news networks hiring promising young black journalists, as long as those papers, magazines and networks also hire promising young white journalists, and those young black journalists are not brought aboard through some special minority-hiring program.
That’s where the Times, the so-called Gray Lady, fell short when adding Blair to its exalted reporting staff. CNN reported that Blair came to the newspaper “as part on an internship program designed to help the paper attract more minority reporters.”
The Blair scandal illustrates that stigma’s deleteriousness effects. Because he came to the Times through its program designed to attract minorities, every other black who has come through that program is suddenly suspect.
Sure, it’s unfair. Blair is an unethical journalist who happens to be black. There also are unscrupulous journalists who happen to be white.
“Did race have anything to do with the awful case of Brian Walski, the Los Angeles Times photographer who fabricated the photograph out of Iraq earlier this year?” asks a news release from the National Association of Black Journalists.
“Was it a factor with the two Salt Lake City reporters who sold a fabricated story to the National Enquirer for $20,000 in the Elizabeth Smart case?
Why should it be a factor here?
Well, here’s why: Those white journalists are seen as individuals. They are not viewed as members of a separate class or designated group, mainly because they were not hired through some special program that appears from afar to hold its beneficiaries to less-demanding standards than those outside the program.
Indeed, the fact that the Times even has a minority program suggests that its editors believe they have to cut corners to hire minorities. It implies that, if the Times subjected minorities to the same hiring criteria as whites, the newspaper’s reporting ranks would look like an audience at a Lincoln Center chamber music concert.
But here’s the reality: There are roughly 6,500 black, Hispanic and Asian journalists throughout this fair land, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
A newspaper that boasts the Gray Lady’s prestige can certainly attract the best and brightest of those minority journalists without some stigmatizing program.
When the day comes that The New York Times and other news organizations practice colorblind hiring, when minorities are brought on staff as individuals rather than members of a special class, then the failings of one minority journalist — like Jayson Blair — will not reflect badly on us all.
(Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at [email protected].)