Posted on 06/05/2003 10:12:08 AM PDT by f.Christian
Whatever Happened to Baby Jayson? ©
Norman Liebmann
(A FANTASY IN THE FOURTH ESTATE)
It is time to re-consider Jayson Blair, the New York Times literary pickpocket. If you’re expecting to hear about a nice guy, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you’re expecting to hear about a conscienceless, shifty, scheming, sneaky plagiarist, he’s not a bad guy. This is a guy the 82nd Airborne wouldn’t want to pack their parachutes. He is definitely not a guy you would trust to drive Miss Daisy.
L’affaire Blair moved the headlines from Terrorism to Error-ism. The crisis at The Times intensified the schizophrenia of New York liberals who can’t make up their minds whether they want their town to be more like Sodom or more like Gomorrah. Whichever they choose, it will be, as are most things about New York, over-promoted and consequently overrated.
It is not certain how Blair got his job at The New York Times. Some say he just submitted an application, while others contend a Civil Rights group slipped him under The Times’ door, rang the bell, and ran like hell. Still, the biggies considered Blair’s arrival at The Times as an occasion for Roman candles and confetti. It’s alleged, now retired Editor Howell Raines called for a goat slaughtered in Jayson’s honor, but rescinded the order when the custodial staff threw down their mops and buckets and said, “We don’t do blood.”
Editor Raines put the office on TLC overkill. They erected a bulletin board to remind all concerned when Jayson was to be breastfed, napped, and checked for poop in his Pampers. It is particularly important what time he gets his sho’tenin’ bread and all that other stuff “Mammy’s little baby loves.”
An inner city fashion consultant was engaged to instruct Jayson on how to put on his baseball cap backwards. Blair had neither the sensitivity nor the “smarts” to know he was being treated as a kind of mascot, which is several rungs down from a gopher. Blair was either too dumb to realize he was being patronized or too insensitive to care.
For all the indulgences that he has received from his liberal benefactors, Blair has shown as much gratitude as a parking meter. Rodney King might have been a different story if he had Howell Raines to take him under his wing.
Blair arrived at The Times with an attitude common among people at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/Push. In fact, it’s called “rainbow pushiness.” At the office he quickly became everybody’s candidate for The National Poster Child for Crankiness. One didn’t have to be a racist to dislike Jayson Blair. It took less than five minutes to O.D. on his personality.
People around him learned it isn’t precision work to discern a disparity between racism and resenting people who are just plain obnoxious. Jayson’s colleagues were divided into two groups – those who found him self-destructive, and those who found him not self-destructive enough. Most competed for a chance to re-set his timing mechanism for his self-destructiveness to Fast Forward.
Before coming undone, Jayson was positioned to dethrone Geraldo Rivera as the media’s consummate opportunist-at-large. The kid had all the integrity of a family of gypsy roofers. Blair’s performance at The Times brought new dimensions to the word “versatility.” There was nothing he couldn’t do badly. Fortunately his ass was covered by Howell Raines who played Fagin to his Oliver.
HOWELL RAINES
Howell Raines had brought to his job all the racial objectivity of the first O.J. jury. In his hiring practices, Raines appeared to be more race conscious than an A & R Man (Artists & Repertoire) at Motown Records. Howell’s idea of diversity resembled an old time minstrel show which always had one Caucasian whose name, as I recall, was not Denzel.
Seemingly, it made no difference to Raines that The Times was bulging with stories containing gross inaccuracies and pirated prose, as long as the reporters who filed them looked like the offensive line at Grambling.
Raines credulity did much to obscure the line between diversity and depravity and even led to The Times becoming a morgue of shanghaied articles. Among the staff suspicions deepened when Jayson Blair’s byline turned up on The Dead Sea Scrolls.
It is now the conventional wisdom that getting a job is no longer linked to an ability to perform it. Hence, plagiarism was not only an expedient – but in Jayson’s case, a necessity. Apparently, Jayson turned in two versions of the stories he covered - the version he overheard and the version he ripped off.
This tenderhearted kid would see a well-turned phrase lying unattended on a colleague’s desk and could not find it in his heart to leave it there forsaken. As his work depended on the ingenuity of others, one tends to think of Jayson’s reports as partial birth inspirations.
In consideration of his innate gift for plagiarism, Jayson might have been eligible for a scholarship at The Kennedy School of Cribbing. Raines accepted Jayson’s explanation that he never plagiarized other people’s work - only that, occasionally, some of their artful phrases flew in the window and built nests in his hard drive.
On one occasion he had the temerity to ask, “Mr. Raines, a brilliant article followed me to the office this morning. Can I put my name on it?” In fact, Blair put his imprimatur on a lot of reports he “borrowed”. (Jayson never made the connection between the fact check and the paycheck.) Apparently, Raines found merit in Blair’s free-wheeling method of journalistic acquisition.
One wonders why Jayson would plagiarize others when you consider his muse was never more than a dime bag away. (That wasn’t Johnson’s Baby Powder around his nostrils.) Jayson assured his employers he was not a cocaine addict, but just a guy who didn’t like to walk around with an empty feeling in his nose.
Raines could always tell if Jayson was at his desk by the sight of an I.V. bag feeding “medication” into his cubicle. (Blair’s mentors dismissed his use of drugs as more of a flirtation than an addiction - though, while he was able to taper off, he was just as able to taper back on.) When the Blair scandal broke, Raines hoped to get to the bottom of things by arranging an employee seminar to be held in the main cargo hold of the Titanic.
The New York Times provided its readers with a daily socialist’s eye view of the human dilemma, and its Editor, Howell Raines, offered his mucosal perceptions of how to assuage it. Raines made The Times the hood ornament for the Affirmative Action contraption.
Characteristically, he deplored inhumanity of the slave ships whose decks did not even have facilities for shuffle board. [Note: Considering the wobbly nature of the economy, it has been suggested the only viable alternative to restore financial vigor to the market place would be to get rid of Affirmative Action and bring back slavery. Do the math.]
Still, protestations of Raines’ commitment to racial diversity seemed thin when he failed to deliver on a promise for a series of editorials lamenting the fact that there are no white hockey pucks.
Under his recruiting policies, The Times became a slack ship. It is as if he had reassembled the crew of the Hesperus to put out a newspaper. Ten minutes with Captain Raines on the bridge and The Good Ship Lollipop would have found itself beached in Arizona.
“PINCH”
Arthur O. “Pinch” Sulzberger, Jr. sounds like someone who was baptized at a garden party. It’s said, his mother chose the name “Pinch” from a direction in her favorite book of recipes. In my old neighborhood any kid with the nickname ”Pinch” would also have a life expectancy of about three minutes. How nepotist “Pinch” Sulzberger became the head of the world’s most influential newspaper brings to mind Mort Sahl’s explanation of how Robert “Bobby” Sarnoff got to be President of NBC. “He was hanging the studios and one day his father took a liking to him.”
Under “Pinch’s” management of The Times, liberal bias became equivalent with job security. It would become inevitable that The Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle would have its synonyms in Ebonics. (It is said, a tacit condition of Blair’s employment is that he would remain black while employed by The Times – not pull a Michael Jackson and change color without prior notice.)
EDUCATION
The Affirmative Action program amounts to awarding people like Jayson Blair gratis brownie points and ready-to-wear credentials for any member of a minority from a university called Diplomas ‘r’ Us. These days visitors to “quickie” universities can see the next generation of Jennings, Brokaws, and Rathers moon walking across the quad. The university will throw in a pair of window pane wire rimmed spectacles to make the recipient look intellectual, or at least housebroken, which is all it takes to make one employable at prestigious New York Times.
Affirmative Action is tantamount to dealing diplomas from the bottom of the deck. It has enabled semi-illiterates to graduate from pretentious universities with degrees in English, and now anyone who sounds like Jesse Jackson can be described as talking with a Harvard accent.
As a boy Jayson showed signs of worthlessness which gradually burgeoned into delusions of competence. He lied to everyone in sight included the potted plants. Howell Raines had to explain to the philodendra that it’s all just part of growing up.
It’s been said that Jayson was born with no sense of rhythm and an inability to hit more than forty percent from the free throw line. In the inner city that is not underprivileged – that is crippled. Hence, allowances for Jayson had to be made.
His text revealed he couldn’t spell KKK; nevertheless, he earned praise from Raines for getting two out of the three letters right. Baby Jayson brought out the nurturing instinct of Howell Raines, who was never too busy come to his desk at lunchtime and mash his banana for him. (One would think all this metaphoric potty training of minority journalists is a job someone in Raines’ exalted status would prefer to delegate.)
Before sending Jayson on assignment, Raines would tidy him up with a Q Tip, He cautioned Jayson not to talk to any strange white men wearing dirty raincoats, and to make sure he asked only black policemen to take him across the street.
Apparently, inside every Howell Raines there’s an Oprah Winfrey longing to hear some inner city hustler’s tale of how “Whitey” done him wrong. Like Oprah, the phrase “Get over it!” never took root in his vocabulary.
Raines, the kiss ass editor, tried in vain to infuse Jayson with The Times’ Styrofoam prestige. He presented Blair with press credentials, who reacted as though he had been handed a shoe shine box. Apparently, Jayson’s capacity for gratitude never quite got off the blocks. He remains The Times unhappiest camper.
Blair has availed himself of the advice of W.C. Fields who counseled, “Never give a sucker even break” - especially if he’s an Editor at The Times who considers himself Humanity’s only real hope for the caramelizing of the world’s disparate races.
Blair majored in Deceit with a minor in Ingratitude. He considered getting his doctorate in Skewed American History by writing his thesis on the premise that the Pilgrims were suckers for giving thanks. (Nobody has managed to let his anger lose its focus like Jayson since Hitler gave the rest of the world twenty four hours to get out.)
Indulging Jayson just made it easier for him to stay pissed off – which angered him further. He now refers to his former benefactors at The Times as his slave masters. If indeed they were slave masters they were incompetent ones, because they never got an honest day’s work out of him. Predictably, Jayson’s parting shot was to call his benefactors at The Times “Idiots” without giving them the politically correct courtesy of referring to them by the “I” word.
Blair has morphed into The Terrible Tempered Mr. Bang, and his keepers keep trying to find some psycho-babble label for his perpetual snit, which in the old Hollywood days was covered by the frayed movie cliché, “The natives are restless tonight.” In our time, this unprovoked anger was ultimately attributed to what advertisers of bathroom tissue once called “a harsh toilet paper complex.” Blair is now planning to merchandise his unhappy experiences as an Affirmative Action toddler at The New York Times for a movie to be called Day Care on Forty Third Street.
As with so many of this country’s overindulged underprivileged, Jayson whines he has not gotten his “fair share” but cannot specify of what. If history instructs us, lusting for one’s “fair share” is incurable and not a very attractive aspect of the human condition. It is no longer a cause, nor a crusade, nor a noble aspiration, but a fundraiser to fund other fundraisers.
Raines will always seek to burnish his image as a kind of Charles Foster Kane of Boys Town. He hoped to transfuse Jayson with The Times’ Styrofoam spirit, except Jayson was not there for inspiration. (That’s why he passed up The Soul Train and went for The Gravy Train.) Jayson Blair’s book in preparation promises to be a festival of inner city injustices - ideal grist for HBO.
It can be argued that America has done its part and doesn’t owe Jayson Blair shit. He has admitted that he lies and steals, in as many ways a residue of the Clinton legacy. Other than that there is less to Blair than meets the eye. Some possible solutions are for Bill Gates to design a computer for The Times that can Control/Alt/Delete brat-journalists. In his retirement, perhaps do-gooder Howell Raines might open a home for over-stroked minority reporters where they can all pursue a hobby of collecting social injustices while having some social worker fondu their cocaine in silver spoons.
Then this ...
The effluence of slipshod journalism has spread over this nation like a pox, and no claim to nobility for its mix-master racial aspirations by The New York Times can forgive its misinforming and general duplicity. Their ongoing determination to venture into deepest, darkest, socialism and indulge in literary claim-jumping argues for a media-free environment.
America is waiting to see if The Times has the courage to stand by its contradictions. Likely, the zillionaire liberals who edit and publish The New York Times will gather in a heavily-paneled conference room around their “serious business” oak table to consider what more can be done for Jayson Blair. More than likely they will reach the consensus of opinion, “F**k him. It was only a hobby.”
anyway you can help him out ---
his site has been locked for a week ?
Norman Liebmann is a former Television writer (Johnny Carson, Dean Martin); he wrote and produced Chico and the Man; created the characters for The Munsters (who are all named after his relatives); worked on many great, legendary TV shows such as Baretta and the Dick Van Dyke Show; worked in feature films and theatre; and is a brilliant and insightful columnist/humorist. He received an Emmy Nomination (Bob Newhart Variety Show) and was awarded Writer of the Year (Radio TV Daily). Please visit his website ... Firehat (( busted )) a treasure trove of Clinton and Media bashing.
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