This is a piece at the TimesOnline citing the downfall of Raines to the acid tongues of bloggers. Originally, I was posting this for the archives — another in the litany of offings accrued by the blog community. But, reading it again, I’m getting nauseous.
The catalyst for the downfall of a powerful editor who won seven Pulitzer prizes for his newspaper’s coverage of the September 11 attacks, was the flagrant dishonesty of one of his favourites, Jayson Blair, a young black reporter who plagiarised and made up stories.
The article that gave Blair the most amusement was his account of the reaction of the family of Jessica Lynch, an American prisoner of war in Iraq, to the news of her release. It was datelined Palestine, West Virginia, and described how her father “choked up as he stood on the porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures”.
“That was my favourite,” Blair mocked after he had been found out. “The description was so far off from reality. I just couldn’t stop laughing.”
He had written it all from his flat in Brooklyn. Blair admitted that he was “a total cokehead” and boasted that he had “fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism”
Doesn’t this sound suspiciously like the “Alias” storyline in which Will was forced to give up his career as a journalist with a smile and a shrug because he’d been making up stories while ripped on heroine? I’m all for art-imitating-life and all that, but this is getting ridiculous.
At least we now have some new career goals for struggling writers longing to crack the code of the news biz: just work hard enough to get noticed and by-lined. Then keep your job by making stuff up.