PERSPECTIVES ON THE TIMES
How to Worry About the Blair Affair
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.
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