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| The entire article is worth reading. The parallels are stunning. |
All About The Retrospect | American Journalism Review:
"With that retrospect, the Times rues the day it hired Jayson Blair. In a stunning, nearly 14,000-word exposé that ran Sunday, May 11, on A1 and continued onto four inside pages, the Times detailed the sweep of Blair's deception. A team of five reporters and three editors had spent a week unearthing problems in 36 of 73 national articles Blair wrote from October 2002 until he resigned May 1. They discovered more potential fabrication in spot checks of the more than 600 stories he wrote earlier. To clear the air as well as its record, the paper tried to explain how Blair's fraud went unnoticed even as he attracted in-house attention logging nearly 50 corrections in four years, and despite his metro editor, Jonathan Landman, sending newsroom administrators an e-mail last spring that, according to the Times story, read: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now."
But of course that didn't happen, and Blair's four years at the country's most heralded daily were apparently fraught not only with fabrication and plagiarism, but erratic behavior and disturbing lies, elements that outline a picture of a troubled young man. "In his [apology] letter [to the Times] he alluded to personal problems," Landman says. "He certainly had them.""
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