SPECIAL
REPORT
Blair's
Victims: That Helpless Feeling
By
Adeel Hassan
Some had fairly minor complaints.
Others found facts wrong, entire scenes concocted, and quotes
fabricated. But the victims of Jayson Blair’s transgressions
whom CJR interviewed did share something: a feeling of helplessness.
They either didn’t bother contacting The New York Times about
the errors, or gave up after their phone calls and e-mails went
unanswered or after the problems went unaddressed. Their reactions
to Blair’s journalistic sins — and the reasons for those
reactions — vary widely. But none of them should make The
New York Times or the rest of us feel good about people’s
expectations of journalism these days. Here is a sampling of those
sources and their reactions; all but one are from the stories
the Times corrected in its Jayson Blair opus May 11.
Roger Groot, a law professor at Washington and Lee University
in Virginia, whom Blair profiled on January 2, 2003, says the
piece included a physical description and a Lexington, Virginia,
dateline, although all of his interviews were by phone. Blair
wrote of the “balding professor who looks like a lawyer from
central casting.” Groot says he is not balding. “I wasn’t
misquoted, but even if he had misquoted me, I probably wouldn’t
have called the Times,” Groot said. “This happens all
the time, doesn’t it? It’s the rule, not the exception.”
Groot, a well-known death-penalty opponent who recently joined
the legal defense team of John Lee Malvo (the younger of the two
men charged in the Washington sniper case) and is mentioned in
the press frequently, says he is often misquoted.
But Groot at least talked to the reporter. Robert J. Salemo, the
chief financial officer of the American Craft Museum in Manhattan
(now the Museum of Arts and Design), was horrified to read that
his museum was “already in serious financial trouble before
September 11” in the October 20, 2001, edition of the Times.
Since Salemo never talked to Blair, the museum’s public relations
officer immediately protested to the metro editor and a correction
was made. The correction, which read: “. . . while lower-level
staff members spoke of financial troubles that existed before
September 11, the director, Holly Hotchner, says the museum’s
finances are strong,” still left Salemo unsatisfied. He suspects
that Blair got his information from a Times employee who was the
husband of a museum staff member he had just fired. Salemo also
notes that the full financial records of the museum are on the
Internet at GuideStar.com. They show that the museum was not in
financial trouble before September 11. Salemo felt burned by both
the story and the correction and didn’t pursue his concerns
further. “Jayson Blair took the pen, which is mightier than
the sword, and drove it through people’s hearts,” he
says. Later, when a Times reporter called Salemo in preparation
for the long corrective article about Blair, “he asked me
what I told Blair when he called. I said ‘He didn’t
call me.’ The reporter was shocked. I might have been one
of the earlier calls” on the reporter’s list.
For Pete Mahoney, associate athletic director at Kent State University,
the shock came on Monday, November 25, 2002, when his boss told
him about a Times sports story from Saturday, November 23, about
Division I football programs bending rules to meet the NCAA minimum-attendance
requirement. Mahoney was quoted as saying he, too, would bend
rules: “We are going to try it until someone tells us to
stop.” But Jayson Blair, he says, had only left a voice message
for Mahoney the day before the story was published. They never
spoke. “I was mad as hell because it made me look bad in
front of my boss and the administration,” Mahoney says. “If
I had spoken to him, and my words were taken out of context, then
I could have lived with that. But the freaking guy is a freaking
liar.” Mahoney says he didn’t pursue the matter with
the Times because “they hold the pen and have the financial
resources.” His boss, Athletic Director Laing Kennedy, however,
did call Blair. “I asked him how a responsible newspaper
could put out a story like that,” Kennedy recalls. “I
said, ‘No one here has talked to you; who did you talk to?
There are many problems in your story.’ Blair was very polite.
He said, ‘I cannot divulge my sources.’” Kennedy
pressed on and got an e-mail from Blair (see above), asking him
to detail his complaints, which he did. But Kennedy never heard
back. Kennedy then e-mailed William Brink, who was deputy sports
editor at the time. But Kennedy sent it to the wrong address and
never heard back. Kennedy gave up. Kennedy points out that the
Times article was brought to his attention by the president of
his college, Carol Cartwright, who chairs the NCAA executive committee.
After Cartwright read the story, she left Kennedy a terse note:
“This does not represent us very well.” Kennedy notes
that the “story was corrected in a local newspaper, but that’s
100,000 readers. The Times has over one million readers. The Times
is a world-class, national newspaper, and the article questioned
our credibility. It hurt us. Of course it hurt us.”
Gary Ahlert, the owner of a small marketing firm in Connecticut,
says he was also hurt by Blair. In November 1999, he was helping
the Times with information for a story on white-collar crime against
individuals and small businesses and the difficulty in prosecuting
the cases. Ahlert had been looking for an investment loan and
found an ad for one in, oddly enough, The New York Times: “Attention
Brokers. Hard Money Financing. Ivex Financial.” He checked
it out and it seemed legitimate. Only it wasn’t. After reporting
the fraud to the government and getting nowhere, he thought it
would be a good story idea and contacted the Times. Apparently,
the Times agreed. “There was another reporter working on
the story and she had all the facts correct,” Ahlert says.
“But she was reassigned and Blair came on. He made appointments.
He blew off appointments.” Ahlert says he gave Blair boxes
of evidence for the article and when he finally met him, he says
Blair was “compassionate and kind.” Blair’s article
appeared on the front of the metro section on March 13, 2000.
The story, which Ahlert thought would cast his business as a victim
of white-collar crime, implied shady business deals on Ahlert’s
part and had many facts wrong, he says, such as what investments
were made, and even the name of Ahlert’s daughter. “Everything
he wrote was fiction,” Ahlert says. “He totally humiliated
the business, my own business.” What happened next may be
equally shocking. “We just decided to let it drop,”
Ahlert says. “They’re creating facts and we didn’t
want any more publicity. We were greatly embarrassed by the thing.”
Ahlert happens to be a former newspaper reporter, and says the
incident changed him. “I used to believe in journalism,”
he says. “I had the highest regard for journalists. The Times
can be used as toilet paper as far as I’m concerned.”
The Times finally made a correction on May 11, 2003, citing two
inaccuracies. Ahlert contacted his attorneys and says he is considering
his options, arguing that if the Times knew of Blair’s behavior
and didn’t stop it, the newspaper should be held accountable.
Lieutenant Commander Jerry Rostad, the public affairs officer
at the National Naval Medical Center, is more forgiving: “In
any profession,” he says, “there are a few bad apples.”
In a front-page story on April 19, 2003, Rostad saw Blair’s
deceit from the dateline: Bethesda. But: “He was never here,
he was never at the hospital,” Rostad says. “I knew
everyone who was at the base. Some reporters did try and sneak
in, but they were caught.” Blair’s story quoted six
wounded marines at the hospital, some of whom were not even staying
there at the time, Rostad says. Yet he didn’t complain. “There
were a couple of reasons why I didn’t contact the Times:
One, I was above my eyeballs in responding to queries. So I had
to weigh minimizing the mistakes in one paper versus fifty media
requests. Two, I likened it to a business relationship or a relationship
you have with a neighbor. You have to think about whether you
want to complain. I didn’t want to willy-nilly call The New
York Times and start World War III with them.” Rostad says
that one of the injured marines Blair quoted falsely had his mother
call the Times. “She said who she was and why she was calling,”
Rostad says. “She’s a marine mother and they didn’t
respond. That was a tough pill to swallow.”
Even journalists were among those who failed to notify the Times
about Blair’s transgressions. When Blair called Lee Gardner,
editor of the Baltimore City Paper, last December about a sensitive
trial that had split Baltimore, Gardner says he was helpful, giving
him some information, but stipulating that his quotes were not
for attribution. But then Gardner saw his name and a quote the
next day in the Times. Gardner says that there were two reasons
he didn’t call the Times: “One, it wasn’t that
big a deal, and two, I think I’ve gotten used to everyone
saying ‘I was misquoted’ or ‘That was taken out
of context.’”
Second Lieutenant Cathy L. Milhoan, a spokeswoman for the 512th
Airlift Wing at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, also had polite
interactions with Blair. In fact, he e-mailed her a link to the
Times’s April 1, 2003, story in which she was quoted. Still,
she says, Blair got it wrong. “I saw I was misquoted and
it bothered me because I spent a lot of time explaining that particular
point to him,” she says. Blair quoted her as saying of the
reservists who staff the military mortuary there, “They have
really been taxed both logistically and emotionally.” But
she says that no one felt “taxed” and that it was their
duty. She claims that she never uses words like “logistically.”
“That’s not the way I speak,” she says. “None
of the quotes were the way I spoke them. I called him and he apologized.
He said ‘I’m sorry, I must have gotten that wrong.’”
There was also another error in the article, which Blair agreed
was incorrect. But no corrections were made until the May 11 mea
culpa. Further, Milhoan says that when she reread the story she
felt as if she had read it before. She had. She keeps a file of
all articles about Dover Air Force Base, and found that part of
Blair’s article had been plagiarized from the Delaware State
News. When she consulted her logs, she discovered that Blair had
never been to the base. But Milhoan didn’t question Blair’s
dateline. Despite all this, she hasn’t soured on journalism.
“The New York Times is still a fine newspaper,” she
says. “This doesn’t change what I think about them or
the business.”
One Blair article, published on September 16, 2001, that was not
corrected in the May 11 piece was about a town ninety miles north
of New York City. Kingston, New York, according to Blair, was
struggling after an IBM plant closed there. But the plant wasn’t
even in that Hudson River city. It was in Ulster, a neighboring
town. “Blair had started calling in July and August of 2001
and I spoke to him two times,” says Thomas Collins, a local
real-estate agent. “He interviewed me a couple of times on
the phone for a half-hour each, and I sent him to other people.
I gave him leads and set up an appointment with the mayor.”
Then he saw the article. “I read it and I couldn’t believe
how he butchered us,” Collins says, of Blair’s descriptions
of Kingston’s problems with drug abuse, homelessness, and
crime. “Blair never even came up here. I didn’t respond.
When it comes to the media, I just leave it alone. In my point
of view, so much damage was already done. And I thought nobody
in the world read it just a few days after the tragedy of September
11.” The story ran with a Kingston, New York, dateline and
opens with this scene: “The weed-strewn parking lots and
abandoned houses became a common sight here . . . .”
James Maloney, the Ulster tax assessor, left two voice-mail messages
for Blair about two factual errors in the article. Maloney says
that on occasion, he has contacted newspapers about errors. “But
no one has ever run a correction,” he says.
