Just a few days ago, I wrote that had Jayson Blair tried to pull off the level of fraud that he achieved in the newsroom of the New York Times on the paper's Sports desk, he would have been found out in a New York minute.
In the current issue of Newsweek, I couldn't help but notice this passage in their cover story on Blair that concerned his tenure on the campus paper at the University of Maryland:
But while Blair was charming the powerful adults, he was alienating virtually everyone he worked with on The Diamondback, the student newspaper he would eventually run. His tenure as editor was marked by strife, allegations of racism, problematic stories and fantastical tales.
I’ve always thought that one of the big problems with sports journalism has been the over-reliance on blind sourcing. Jayson Blair could have easily duped most of the sports editors in this country by simply planting false “background” quotes in his articles.
Blind sourcing isn’t just a problem on the sports page, it’s a problem in newsrooms in general. What I was pointing out here was Blair’s general inability to bother even with the basics of getting a story right — something that apparently included fabricating people out of thin air inside a locker room.
Do this even once while covering a pro sports team in New York, and you’d be finished.