Jayson Blair (born March 23, 1976) is an American life coach and journalist formerly with The New York Times. He resigned from the newspaper in May 2003 in the wake of the discovery of plagiarism and fabrication in his stories.
After a summer interning at The New York Times in 1998, Blair was offered an extended internship. He indicated that he had to complete some coursework in order to graduate, and The New York Times agreed to defer it. He returned to The New York Times in January 1999, after "everyone assumed he had graduated. He had not; college officials say he has more than a year of course work to complete."[4] That November, he became an "intermediate reporter.
The Times reported on Blair's journalistic misdeeds in an unprecedented 7,239-word front-page story on May 11, 2003, headlined "Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception." The story called the affair "a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper."[4] On the NPR radio show "Talk of the Nation", Blair explained that his fabrications started with what he thought was a relatively innocent infraction: using a quote from a press conference which he had missed. He described a gradual process whereby his ethical violations became worse and contended that his main motivation was a fear of not living up to the expectations that he and others had for his career.
The investigation saw heated debate over affirmative action hiring. Jonathan Landman, Blair's editor, told the Siegal committee he felt being black played a large part in Blair's initial promotion to full-time staffer. "I think race was the decisive factor in his promotion," he said. "I thought then and I think now that it was the wrong decision."[14] On May 14, 2003, while he was still Times executive editor, Howell Raines acknowledged at a massive meeting of Times news staffers, managers, and its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., that Blair had gotten the breaks he had enjoyed because of his race.
Howell Hiram Raines (born February 5, 1943 in Birmingham, Alabama) is an American journalist. He was Executive Editor of The New York Times from 2001 until he left in 2003 in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal.
