New York Papers Break Silence on Blair Book

By: Greg Mitchell Breaking the silence on Jayson Blair's upcoming book "Burning Down My Masters' House," both The New York Times, where he once worked, and the Daily News today described and quoted from the book. Not surprisingly, the two papers focused on different aspects of the book from the ex-Times reporter who brought disgrace on his paper last spring and fueled the departure of Executive Editor Howell Raines.

Missing from the Times account this morning, for example, are excerpts the Daily News' Paul D. Colford pounced on, such as: "Zuza [my girlfriend] took pictures of me prancing around the newsroom wearing a Persian head wrap that covered my face, Kermit the Frog on my shoulders and a giant fake fur coat. I did a full tour de newsroom in this peculiar uniform. It is hard to know what I was feeling, other than it was exhilarating to shock everyone. Perhaps I was crying out for attention."

The Daily News also reports that Blair "was ready to hang himself with his belt the night before he resigned his job, but stopped himself, he writes, when he realized he had been sober for more than a year and had found love with a Times colleague."

Blair, according to Colford, also calls the Times "a cutthroat culture that leaves no rivals standing."

Colford did not reveal how he obtained a copy of the book. But from the Times report, by Jacques Steinberg, it apparently pays to order from Amazon. The Times was able to report on the book thanks to a news assistant at the paper who obtained a copy by pre-ordering from Amazon.com. The paper had received advance galleys of the book previously but anyone with an advance look had to sign a confidentiality agreement.

Amazon sent out the copy, perhaps by mistake, before the March 6 sale date. Sales of the book at Amazon remained sluggish as of this morning, with its ranking at 8,256, but by mid-afternoon, the ranking had jumped to 544.

The publisher's attorney told a publishing newsletter today that he had "problems" with the Times quoting from the book before the sale date (See "Blair Publisher Responds to 'Times' Book Report."

The Times apparently could not resist reporting on the book, despite the memo to staff from Executive Editor Bill Keller earlier this week which said, "We don't intend to respond to Jayson or his book." Michael Viner, president of New Millenium, which is publishing the book, has cited Keller's comments as evidence of "the smear campaign" by the paper against Blair.

E&P last month reported the first actual quotes from the book, based on an interview with Viner, in which he said that early on Blair writes, "I lied and I lied, and then I lied some more." This is confirmed in this morning's Steinberg article.

From the Times' summary, at least, there appears to be little new of a factual nature in the book -- although Steinberg does not go deeply into how Blair characterizes his relationship with Raines or former Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, and other sensitive issues. However, Blair in the book "lashes out at more than a half dozen editors and reporters who he saw as thwarting his professional ascent," according to Steinberg.

Blair also reveals one fabrication, possibly his first step down the wayward path, that the Times failed to discover during its extensive probe last spring that led to a lengthy correction.

In an article published a week after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Blair profiled a day trader purportedly named Andrew Rosstein who had fled a brokerage office in tears after suffering huge losses. "I improvised by creating a last name for him," Blair writes in his book, according to today's Times account. "I had lifted quotes from other papers before, but never made something up ... I do not know where it came from or how I got the name or even what I was feeling at the moment -- other than a desperate desire to get into the newspaper."

Elsewhere in the book, according to the Times, Blair admits many other deceptions "but writes that they were fueled by ambition, cocaine and alcohol abuse and an undiagnosed condition of manic depression." Blair, the paper says, "discusses the pressures he felt as a black man in a predominantly white newsroom" and "the psychosis he said he experienced on some assignments." Yet he "expresses little remorse for the pain his actions caused -- whether for the subjects of his articles, many of them the families of American soldiers killed in Iraq, or for his former colleagues."

In his e-mail message to the news staff this week, Keller, who succeeded Raines as executive editor, wrote: "The author is an admitted fabricator. The book pretends to be a mea culpa but ends up spewing imaginary blame in all directions."

In Colford's story this morning, he reports that in the book Blair recalls "giving and receiving sex for drugs, before being diagnosed with manic depression." Blair describes using costly amounts of cocaine while a Times staffer, saying, "I was tired of having to buy bottles of nose spray before heading into the office in the morning." There were times when drugs "loosened myself enough to make advances on women, and there were other less memorable moments where I performed, or received, a sexual favor for drugs. When I was on the performing end, it was usually implicit that it was for drugs."