More Jayson Blair

Eric Boehlert of Salon has a story devoted to the race angle. One quote from Jim Dwyer, “a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Times” struck me as interesting:

…”I’ve worked at six newspapers and seen alcoholic shipwrecks and drug shipwrecks, and people who’ve fallen apart through nervous breakdowns, and they’re all brought back and given a second chance. I’ve seen it happen to people of every race”.

Also, I now have to add Mike Barnicle and Jeff Jacoby to the list of errant reporters who were not affirmative action hires. Jacoby amusingly copied an old Ann Landers piece on What Happened to the Founding Fathers? without attribution and as the product of his own research–this was a story that previously made the email and AM radio circuits. And many of the details of the purloined stories are false–as I said before, it’s easiest to catch the unskilled plagiarizers.

AB