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This unsigned editorial appeared in the May 19 issue of E&P.

Of all the lessons The New York Times, and newspapers in general, should draw from the saga of Jayson Blair, the least significant is the one that is generating the most heated discussion. Though he is young and African American, his race and the Times' avid desire to diversify its newsroom explain little about Blair's ability not just to survive but to flourish at the newspaper during four years of repeated unprofessional behavior that culminated in a long binge of fabrication and plagiarism while assigned to the highest-profile national stories of the moment.

While the usual anti-diversity crowd was charging the Times with a double standard on race last week, the paper's attorneys were at a federal libel trial in Cleveland, vigorously -- and expensively -- defending a reporting mistake in a 2000 article by Fox Butterfield. That's the same Fox Butterfield, national correspondent and white male, who embarrassed the Times in 1991 when it emerged that he had lifted material from a story in The Boston Globe while reporting, ironically, on plagiarism by a Boston University dean. On journalistic merit, Butterfield does not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the fabulist Blair -- and we do so only to emphasize that race does not necessarily determine who gets second chances at the Times.

The real lesson from the Blair affair is that the Times' system for dealing with accuracy in its newspaper and discipline in its newsroom is badly broken -- if, indeed, any system exists. It's all very well to "trust" reporters, as Times executives insistently declared, but the dull credulity top editors evinced throughout this episode suggests they have not learned the first thing the old hardscrabble City News Bureau in Chicago told its greenest recruits: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

How is it, for instance, that The New York Times could be gulled into publishing on its front page a story accusing a teenager of being the triggerman in the Washington-area sniper attacks -- without any editor apparently ever asking the tyro reporter to identify these unnamed "law-enforcement officials" he is quoting?

One inescapable conclusion from this scandal is that the Times has developed an addictive tolerance for anonymous sources, the crack cocaine of journalism. The Times could not go cold turkey even in its extraordinary Mother's Day cataloging of Blair's journalistic sins, an occasion that cried out for 100% on-the-record reporting. For no apparent reason other than habit, an entirely innocuous e-mail message was attributed to "one fellow reporter."

The Times appears to have been shocked out of its complacency. After first trying to lay all the blame on Blair, the paper's executives last week promised to implement what the Times needs most: a coherent system to keep fabrications and plagiarism out of the paper.
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