SPECIAL
REPORT
How
to Worry About the Blair Affair
By
Richard C. Wald
Now that the shouting is
over, a whispered question remains: Did The New York Times’s
enormous self-regard make more of this Jayson Blair problem than
it was worth?
After all, there are historians lined up for the Blair Prize.
And right now somewhere in the United States a lawyer is dipping
into the funds of widows and orphans, a doctor is doing something
truly stupid to a patient, an accountant is figuring out ways
to cheat the government. For one of those licensed professionals
to be worth four-plus pages in The New York Times, plus the cover
of Newsweek, plus the comment of half the tribe that chatters,
he or she would have to bring down Enron or find a cure for AIDS.
And when have two stars of the business been dismissed because
the staff was unhappy?
So the case of Jayson Blair is overblown, right? Wrong. It hurt
the Times, which is a shame; it hurts journalism, though we’ll
get over it; but it hurts society in ways that are hardly remarked
upon and need some discussion. What is at stake, oddly, is what
was not said.
Our world is always in a state of flux. Except for brief flashes
of self-rule, history is a litany of kings, emperors, despots,
and petty chiefs, ruling with autocratic disregard. Only recently
have large numbers of people tried to govern themselves. Older
than most of our democracies are the voluntary associations. I
went to a college that is almost 700 years old. Look back to the
Masons or merchant guilds, look around to Kiwanis, Rotaries, book
clubs, sailing clubs, and the like, and you find longevity based
on willing association. Vaclav Havel lumped them together as civil
society, the part of our lives outside the home and outside the
government that totalitarian regimes hate and try to destroy.
In our civil society, under the great dispensation of the First
Amendment and the way the courts have interpreted it, the press
plays a unique role. It knits together the voluntary interests,
it spreads the news of government and of opposition to government,
it is the beginning of choice. Otis Chandler used to say that
in Los Angeles, such community as existed was provided by the
Los Angeles Times. Little else knitted it together. But you know
all that.
Now we come to Jayson Blair and what did not happen.
He stole from The Washington Post, but the Post reporters did
not complain. He made up quotes, but by and large, those quoted
did not complain — or did so only feebly. Only late in the
game, when he stole from the San Antonio Express-News, was he
stopped.
Why? There are very few mutes who work as reporters for The Washington
Post. They tend to read The New York Times. Why didn’t they
complain? Everybody does it? People falsely quoted didn’t
complain. Because they thought “everyone does it”? Because
they could not get through to the Times? Maybe because they don’t
care any more? For nice, chilling reading about how the press
is becoming a remote bureaucracy, is becoming “them,”
look at some of the responses to the Associated Press Managing
Editors’ big survey of readers and sources. The first paragraph
from the report by Carol Nunnelley and Phil Shook:
“Deborah Hudgins of Manchester, Md., has caught errors in
her local newspaper but she doesn’t bother to report them.
‘What’s the point?’ she asked. ‘Do they really
care?’”
That is the rub.
In the wake of the Blair affair, news organizations throughout
the country properly looked to how they do things. Truth is important
to each one. Some commentators took glee in the Times’s pain.
Yet it might happen to them. And, in essence, journalism searched
inward.
If enough people failed to complain about an institution as prominent
as The New York Times, if people don’t complain about the
myriad other things we get wrong, then the separation between
the press and the people has grown large and deep enough to be
dangerous for all of us. We have developed for ourselves a society
in which information flows through newspapers, television, cable,
radio, Web sites, magazines, books, pamphlets, think-tanks, seminars,
in unending talk. But talk is not communication. That depends
on hearing, on all the things that make trust. As trust frays,
cohesion fails, and we are left with mere words — our world
of constant spin — and the triumph of the image.
Presidents don’t land on aircraft carriers in jumpsuits because
that’s the way they normally behave. They do it because,
across the babble, it is the image that provides the only cohesion,
because we can attach to it the meaning that suits us. When information
becomes transitory and not valuable, when it does not matter who
brings it to you “because they’re all alike,” civil
society is in trouble. The Ottoman empire lasted far longer than
we have so far because it was based on power. When the power waned,
the empire waned. Our society is based on information, jointly
accepted as both true and worth having. If we think it is not
true and it doesn’t seem worth arguing over, we have a problem
much larger than Mr. Blair or The New York Times.
