WEEKLY COLUMN:
JDM vs the WORLD

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FINE PRINT

One of my favorite jokes as a kid was the one that went, “What’s black and white and red all over?” The answer, of course, was a zebra with a diaper rash… though there was always the slightly more popular answer, a newspaper. You know, because the print is black, the paper is white, and it’s read all over. Get it? Read all over? It’s a homophone. It’s comedy.

Well, at any rate, let’s move on to one black, white, and red paper in particular, the New York Times, a.k.a. the Old Gray Lady, a.k.a. the Red Menace Morning-Star, a.k.a. the Communist Party’s Paper of Record—the gift that keeps giving when you give it to your bird. In keeping with the Soviet policies of glasnost and perestroika, the Times is in the news now because of a four-page article/admission of guilt on the subject of Jayson Blair. Who’s Jayson Blair? Jayson Blair is the 27-year-old African-American reporter forced to resign for crimes against integrity. The charge: He fabricated, falsified, plagiarized, and outright lied in a series of stories that dates back years.

I’ve heard it said he was smoking in the boy’s room, too. Don’t quote me on that, though, my imaginary sources might be wrong.

Either way, Blair hasn’t made news just by making up news. The other big scandal here is that he’s black and was hired because of it. Affirmative action, I think it’s called. More on that in a moment. Let’s focus first on the man, his myths and his legends.

One of the beats Blair covered for the Times was that of the Beltway Snipers. You remember them, don’t you? Well, just as Lee Malvo and John Muhammad had the Washington area convinced they were masterminds before they went and used a stolen credit card (there’s a good idea, link yourself to the scene of a crime), Blair, too, covered his tracks so half-heartedly that you’d think he was trying to get caught. He would claim to be on-location, for example, while writing from the comfort of home. He handed in receipts from Brooklyn stores and restaurants, claiming they were from Maryland. He also made a habit out of standing up his colleagues on the road. This guy did everything short of wearing a sign that said, “Fire me now, for the end is nigh.”

Jayson Blair may or may not be the world’s biggest idiot, I can’t say for sure. What I can say, however, is he was just dumb enough to outsmart the Times, and that’s a pretty remarkable thing. I mean, his “long trail of deception,” as the paper’s mea culpa called it, was right up there with the Hansel and Gretel affair as far as obviousness goes. It was hardly the stuff of Sherlock Holmes. In fact, this was below even Encyclopedia Brown and the Olsen twins. We’re talking a Hans Blix murder mystery here. Blair could’ve turned his cubicle into a biochemical weapons lab, with flasks of pure fiction mislabeled as fact, and his superiors still wouldn’t’ve caught on.

Lies? He’s not concocting lies. Young Frankenstein here is just cooking up a cure for SARS.

So, how is it, exactly, that the Times allowed for such a communication breakdown? It’s easy, actually. It’s called gatekeeping. Newspapers do it all the time. When they talk about “all the news that’s fit to print,” they mean all the news that fits their agenda. When it came to Blair, they were so eager to see him succeed that they shuffled him up the ladder without warning anyone he was ripe for a fall—because, as executive editor Howell Raines put it, they wouldn’t want to “stigmatize” the kid.

Listen: If you like the guy, if you want to see him do well, that’s fine, but for God’s sake give him a job he’s capable of and let him go from there. There are other places you can put him. The mail room. The printing press. He doesn’t need to be on the fast track to front page reporting if he’s falling further and further behind. This is like sending an unprepared kindergartner to the first grade because you don’t want him to feel bad. Tough. Let him feel bad. It’s only the first grade. He’ll get over it when he gets there next year.

Not passing or failing on your own merits is failure overall. What’s more, it means you won’t be ready for failure when you’re finally faced with it—and believe me, if you’re human, you’re going to face it eventually.

That’s where affirmative action comes in.

There are those who believe Blair’s incompetence was tolerated for as long as it was on account of his skin color. Newsroom diversity was what brought him to the Times, after all, so it makes sense. As John Leo wrote in U.S. News & World Report, “Relaxing standards or pushing an unprepared candidate into a high-pressure job tends to increase the odds of trouble. All of us figure this out rather quickly when the preferred group is relatives of the boss or people who went to the boss’s college. It’s true of identity groups as well.”

But if you ask Condace Pressley, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, there’s no affirmative action angle here at all. Quoted in an NABJ press release, she says, “What Jayson Blair did hurt all journalists, regardless of ethnicity or background. But for those critics of diversity to assert that Blair did what he did or got where he got solely because of the color of his skin is just plain wrong, myopic and lazy journalism.”

She’s right… almost.

That Blair presented other writers’ words as his own, that he outright lied time and again, has nothing to do with his being black. Lying is a human condition, like love and hate or that gag reflex you get driving past the Staten Island landfills the first few hundred times. The whopper transcends culture. It’s the great equalizer. It’s what makes us human. Without lying and opposable thumbs, squirrel monkeys would seize our throne and rule as the dark lords of the animal kingdom for a thousand years plus one. So, in a strange way, lying ain’t so bad (that’s a lie, I know, but work with me here).

Blair’s behavior has nothing to do with his being black—Ms. Pressley got that one right. She might even be right when she suggests affirmative action has nothing to do with this story. For all we know, Blair’s bosses kept him on not because he was black but because they have no idea what they’re doing. Considering how it’s the New York Times, I’d like to believe that’s the case regardless.

But my question for Ms. Pressley is, if race isn’t an issue here, why, then, is there a National Association of Black Journalists at all? There’s no National Association of White Journalists, nor is there a Congressional White Caucus, a Miss White America Pageant, or White Entertainment Television. Rightfully so, I might add, because those are really bad ideas. Having one set of race-based programs without the other, however, only feeds into the problems that Ms. Pressley’s organization wishes to solve.

But let’s say race isn’t the issue in this story after all. So what? Race wasn’t the issue when O.J. Simpson bludgeoned his ex-wife and a waiter friend, either, but I’ll be damned if his skin color didn’t set him free. I’m not saying it’s right that we jump to conclusions and play the race card in the case of Jayson Blair. Not at all. What I’m saying is that’s what you get when you allow the race card to be played in the first place. When you race-bait, you’re eventually going to get bit.

The way I figure, the only real racism in America nowadays is in programs like the one that got Blair his job. Americans ought not oppose affirmative action because it benefits blacks, but rather because it doesn’t. At its very core, affirmative action contradicts the dream of which Martin Luther King spoke. It judges blacks by the color of their skin, not the content of their character. This is wrong.

Even worse, affirmative action suggests that a young black man, such as Jayson Blair, can’t succeed without some old white guy holding his hand. This is no better than saying democracy can’t work in the Middle East, as if the average Arab isn’t capable of wanting Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness as much as you or me. It doesn’t matter if these programs have good intentions. All the good intentions in the world won’t change the fact that blacks can, indeed, make it without the assistance of whites in power. Telling them otherwise is as much a lie as any of Blair’s fairytales. Don’t take my word for it. Just ask Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice. They didn’t succeed because of skin color. They succeeded because they’re good.

You don’t need me to tell you that what Blair did is a black eye for Blair, not a black eye for black people. Some might say it isn’t a black eye for affirmative action, but, by this policy’s own precedent, it is. Think about it: If we can’t expect a guy like Blair to break through the system on his own, how, then, can organizations like the NABJ and the New York Times blame him when he fails? In good conscience, they can’t. Yet they have.

Black, white, red—whatever. If we can’t look past skin color, we’re not moving forward. We’re living in the past. That’s too bad.

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