Frank Rich on the Jayson Blair thing:
Our scandal would not have seemed a candidate for such theatrics. Though it did carry a whiff of race, which is always a crowd pleaser, it was missing three elements that are central to the genre — celebrities, money and sex. Most of the world had never heard of Jayson Blair. And while his journalistic sins were grave, as were the internal newsroom failings that allowed him to thrive, it was hard to imagine that the story was fascinating enough to a mass audience to sustain five weeks of cliffhanger coverage.
Much of that coverage was accurate, fair and balanced (except, predictably, from the Murdoch empire). The Times was hardly an innocent victim; we made big mistakes, and not just those wrought by Mr. Blair. His transgressions exposed festering issues throughout the newsroom. But it was the sheer volume and relentlessness of the attention given our travails that was dizzying.
[Break]
The paper thought that by running a four-page-plus, blow-by-blow account of Mr. Blair's infractions and a preliminary internal investigation, it was delivering the last word (or last 14,000 words) on the story. But the medium is indeed the message, and the encyclopedic size of our account, almost large enough to be a section titled "A Newspaper Challenged," sent the message that The Times itself thought the Blair saga was larger than, say, the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Other news organizations cannot be faulted for echoing our disproportionate treatment of the story in their own assiduous and voluminous follow-up attempts to fill in any blanks.
Jayson Blair story: scandal? Of course. Scandal of the same magnitude as say, hyped intelligence on WMD, bullshit accounting methods used to calculate Bush's budget and tax cut, or the Justice Department's round 'em up policy of middle easterners, legal and illegal, post 9-11? Hell no the Blair story is not of the same magnitude. As Sam Jackson says in Pulp Fiction, "Ain't no fucking ballpark. Look, it ain't the same ballpark, it ain't the same league, it aint even the same fucking sport." So let's just chill the fuck out over this Blair story and pay a little bit more attention to the real scandals going on. You know, the ones that erode civil liberties, threaten the foundations of the American economy, and cause a lot of people to die because SOME GUY MIGHT HAVE HAD SOME WEAPONS AT SOME TIME BUT HEY, WE CAN'T FIND ANY FUCKING PROOF OF THAT SO I GUESS WE'LL JUST FORGET ABOUT IT AND ALL THE PEOPLE THAT WERE KILLED AND GO BACK TO WATCHING ROAD RULES. You know, minor things like that.
Posted by mike at June 16, 2003 11:17 AM