Blair Fallout Impacts Newspapers Across U.S.

By: Mark Fitzgerald Connie Schultz's May 12 column in The Plain Dealer in Cleveland had nothing to do with former reporter Jayson Blair, yet within hours of its publication, dozens of angry readers had left messages accusing her of being just like the 27-year-old whose record of fabrication, plagiarism, and misrepresentation had been laid out the day before in a massive account by The New York Times.

Schultz had written about a lesson in respect from encounters with two cab drivers. But she hadn't mentioned their names, for what she thought were very good reasons. "They were low-paid workers and immigrants, and I didn't want them to get in any trouble because they talked to a newspaper columnist," Schultz said.

Many of her readers, however, thought she was trying to pull a fast one. "You're no better than Jayson Blair, and I would think you've learned from his public humiliation that you can't make things up," one caller told her.

"Every single message had Jayson Blair's name in it," a still-shaken Schultz recalled last week. Repeatedly, her callers and e-mail correspondents angrily ripped Times management for allowing the deceptions. Schultz had figured the Blair affair was too much of an inside-media, New York-sort of story to matter to her Cleveland readers. She said she knows better now. "I don't think this one is going away," Schultz said. "Columnists do a lot of [public] speaking, and I suspect I'll be speaking about this for months to come."

As the reaction grew through the week to The New York Times' revelations, newspapers across the nation began to realize that Jayson Blair is now their problem, too. A public scandal at The New York Times -- the average American's Platonistic ideal of a newspaper -- necessarily taints newspapers everywhere, journalists are learning.

"People think, if it can happen at The New York Times ... it must happen at all papers," said Robert Leger, editorial-page editor of the Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader and president of the Society of Professional Journalists.

"There's going to be fallout," said Dean Mills, dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia. "It's depressing, but there's no way around it."

Speaking from a Manhattan far from Times Square, Edward L. Seaton, publisher and editor in chief of The Manhattan (Kan.) Mercury, said the Blair scandal was a blow to all papers. "Our jaws are just dropping here," he said. To Seaton, one of the most unsettling revelations of the scandal is how few subjects of Blair's fabricated or plagiarized stories went to the Times with their complaints. "I think it's disturbing that the public accepts errors with the nation's paper of record. If that's the case with The New York Times, it makes you wonder about other papers."

In the view of many editors, the Times got itself in this fix by its lax policy on anonymous sources. Right after the Blair story broke, top editors at the Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star re-examined their accuracy and ethics policies, and concluded the newsroom was in good shape. "We've got an accuracy policy that looks like it's stricter than The New York Times'," Editor Kathleen Rutledge said with a laugh. Reporters must get approval before citing anonymous sources in a story, and must identify the source to an editor.

Nevertheless, the paper is calling a staff meeting this week to talk over the policies. Last week, editors at the Journal Star and all other Lee Enterprises Inc. newspapers received a memo from David Stoeffler, vice president for news, reminding them "credibility" is the first goal on the chain's Priority Card. "It's a sad case," Stoeffler told E&P, "and it brings home to us that we have to pay attention to the basics, that we have to make sure that our reporters are fair and accurate." That starts with asking, "What sort of mechanisms do we have to ensure that our reporters are doing that?" Stoeffler said.

Several editors said they were tightening procedures to ensure future job applicants can't find the loopholes that, for instance, allowed Blair to work for four years at the Times without an undergraduate degree. In Cleveland, Plain Dealer Editor Douglas C. Clifton said he's thinking about introducing the "accuracy letters" -- in which story subjects are asked to comment on the accuracy of the quotes and context of an article -- that he used when he headed The Miami Herald's newsroom.

The chill from the Blair story can be felt even where it's getting little coverage. Speaking from Cheyenne, Wyoming Tribune-Eagle Managing Editor D. Reed Eckhardt said: "This should give all editors pause to consider their policies and procedures. For instance, I don't think any of us can say we know where our reporters are all the time."