Looking for the answers

The thought arises: Why actually visit with defrocked New York Times journalist Jayson Blair in order to write a story about him? Wouldn’t it be perfect payback to use Blair’s own nonexistent journalistic standards -- stay at home, watch him on TV, plagiarize quotes from other writers, then whip out a riveting tale that pretends to be reported in person and on location. That’s what Blair did, undetected, in his worst moments as a reporter at the New York Times, which ran a number of his faux stories on its front page.

Blair laughs uproariously at the idea of doing unto him what he did to others. The whole mess he’s in hasn’t killed his sense of humor. Then he stops short: “Don’t mistake my laughter for lack of shame. I am sorry for what I did. I am contrite and repentant.” He has a sincere, sweet face. The same face that fooled a cadre of veteran editors at New York’s “paper of record.”

Surely, no reporter in his right mind would commit such journalistic crimes. But Blair, 27, contends he wasn’t in his right mind when he perpetrated the bizarre frauds and deceits that rocked his newspaper, deceived its readers, led to the resignation of its two top editors and cost him the career he’d planned since boyhood.

Blair has now written a book about his experiences as a compulsive liar and journalist. He is getting an amazing amount of media coverage for someone so reviled by that very profession, from which he will now probably be banned for life. An hour with Katie Couric on “Dateline NBC,” a morning chat with Matt Lauer, other interviews, book reviews and analytic articles all puzzle over how someone like Blair could happen. And why.

Neither the interviews nor the book, “Burning Down My Masters’ House,” clarify the essential questions: Who is Jayson Blair? Why did he lie? How did he manage to flourish at one of the world’s great papers?

In town for yet more media interviews this week, Blair offered himself for an open-heart discussion. Wearing a new suit and a ready smile, he proved to be charming, witty, intelligent -- and highly medicated.

Now formally diagnosed as manic-depressive, he carries a stash of pills, which he spilled onto the coffee table in his Hollywood hotel room and described thus: “Depakote is for mania; Paxil is an antidepressant; Zyprexa is an antipsychotic; Clonazepam is for extreme l emergency, like if I ever get so manic that I need a pill forced down my throat to knock me out.”

His book has been called whiny, self-absorbed, undocumented, accusatory -- and oddly compelling. Especially so for journalism junkies and students of self-destructive behavior. But plow through it and Blair’s descent pulls you under like a riptide, into a bleak, inescapable swirl of illness that shows hardly a ripple on the surface.

Those at the Times who did spot trouble and sounded alarms apparently were ignored. In one chilling instance, the Times later reported, an editor suspected Blair was making up stories rather than reporting them. He sat Blair down and said, “Look me in the eye and tell me you did what you say you did.” Blair looked him in the eye and lied blithely.

He says now he’s finished with lying. He touts his book as an act of contrition and an explanation of his behavior. But the book raises as many questions as it answers. In it, he seems to blame his failings on editors and others. He says that’s possibly because he wrote it too quickly (in seven weeks) and too soon after the events, when he had very little perspective and too much misdirected anger.

“I may have lashed out at others when I was really angry at myself. If I’d written it a year or two later, it would have been a much different book.” As each day (and each psychotherapy session) passes, he says, he gets less and less angry. “Now I blame no one but myself.”

The book, for which he got a $150,000 advance, is also full of quotes from conversations he says he had with colleagues. Did he run around the office with a hidden tape recorder? “No. There probably should have been a note stating that all conversations are as I remember them taking place, or ones that I wrote about in my journals soon after they happened.”

Yes, but memory often isn’t accurate in even the most stable of individuals, a category Blair didn’t fit into. He was addicted during the first part of his employment and an undiagnosed manic-depressive even after he became clean and sober. Should we believe his “memories”?

They are accurate in essence, he believes. Although he’s not particularly proud of the writing. And he accepts the calumny critics have heaped upon the work. At least they bothered to read it and take it seriously. He is amazed it has caused so much ruckus. Just as he is shocked that his name is linked to the resignations of Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd.

“I was, after all, a low-level employee, a relative newcomer, a person who thought my personal problems and failings had nothing to do with anyone but me.” He was prepared for his own downfall, he says. But not for theirs. “I knew I had damaged the reputation of the Times but ... I didn’t think it would hurt anyone else. I still don’t really understand why it happened to them.”

But he’s been trying. His theory at this point is that “there was a hostile, unstable environment in the newsroom at the Times, because Howell was trying to force change quickly. And in that environment, people who were upset with Howell and Gerald used my mistakes to get at them for other things they were upset with them about.”

Blair’s interview voice is gentle. He is gracious and eager to please. But with his energies unleashed, it’s easy to imagine the other Jayson, the 5-foot-2 hellion and newsroom big-mouth -- dressing in costume, sniffing cocaine in hallways, drinking so steadily at the local bar that its phone number was on an office Rolodex, so he could be reached. And it’s also easy to imagine him, all coked up, as the 24-hour automaton reporter that editors thought they could rely on, the guy who’d go anywhere to get the story and do anything to impress them. “I was trying to market myself, to get noticed,” he says.

Blair’s saga is more tragic than he cares to consider. He wasn’t just a wannabe journalist. He was a kid addicted from boyhood to the profession, which he still calls “noble, and important to democracy.”

After years of summer internships that included the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, he was offered a six-month training program at the New York Times in 1999. He apparently excelled in it. After five months he was promoted to the second level of the program: a three-year stint as intermediate reporter, then promotion to full-time reporter, which was “sort of like getting tenure.” He lasted 16 months after that.

As his deceptions surfaced and interrogations began, Blair claimed he was suicidal and wanted to resign. He did so in May 2003.

“The saddest thing for me in all this is that I’ve lost the opportunity to be in the only profession I’ve ever wanted to be in.”

Blair says his lies as a Times reporter gradually became more and more “creative.” The worst ones occurred in his last months there, after he was clean and sober, and working on his highest profile stories -- the families of Jessica Lynch and other military personnel in Iraq, and the Washington, D.C., sniper case. He composed entire stories, described people and places, without ever having seen them, without having left his apartment. He raided the paper’s photo files to get some descriptions. Others he just made up.

“I got a lot more stories on Page 1 after I started making things up. And that feeds the beast inside you. You get Page 1 once, and you want it every month. You get it two weeks in a row and you want it every week.” At the New York Times, he says, Page 1 is considered “the only page of the paper” for ambitious news reporters. And Blair was, if anything, ambitious.

In his total four years at the Times, he says he wrote about 730 stories, about twice the average for most news reporters. When his deceits were finally discovered, the paper published a 14,000-word explanation.

Blair says the problems at the Times didn’t begin and end with him. A few other reporters, it seemed, had been involved in questionable practices. Nothing as bad as Blair’s low-jinks, but still unacceptable.

In his book, Blair states that others have put datelines on stories from places they didn’t visit -- although the stories may have been accurately reported. “There’s one example on the sniper case where a reporter covering the shootings didn’t leave his house, but had datelines in Washington and Maryland. He said he was in various different locations when he wasn’t. I know because I was providing the legwork, calling them at their homes all day. I spent one day with a reporter on the Washington Mall. The next day I see a story with their byline from Baltimore. I know they couldn’t have been there.

“I mean, the idea of being able to get away with all the things I got away with was planted in my head by watching colleagues do it. As much as people would like to believe that I’m some evil genius who devised this scam, you know, it’s like in any work environment. You pick up on the way other people cut corners.

“That doesn’t excuse one wrong thing I did. What’s important for me to keep in mind is that a person of integrity can look at unethical behavior and still do the right thing. And I wasn’t able to.”

Asked for comment, Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications at the New York Times, said the company would not comment on Blair or his book.

What made Blair tell such extreme lies, and so often?

“I think I lied because I was scared to tell the truth, scared that people would see the real me, which I believed wasn’t good enough. I felt inadequate and like an outsider. It’s taken a lot of therapy to even admit to myself the extent of all the things I’ve done wrong.

“I’m talking about it in public now because I’ve begun the process of working through it. Of learning why I committed the crimes when I had other options. The No. 1 option was that I could have asked for help when I felt unstable and was unraveling. But I didn’t.”

Blair had asked for help once before at the Times. Unable to stop his drinking and drug use, he went to employee assistance and got treatment. “For the rest of my life, I will be grateful to the Times for that.”

His parents taught him values and morals, he says. “For heaven’s sakes, my mother is a retired schoolteacher, my father is inspector general of the Smithsonian Institution, who investigates crime and wrongdoing by employees. He is a man of extremely high integrity, and ethics is his business. It is a sharp irony.”

The family has grown even closer as a result of Blair’s fiasco, he says. “My mother keeps asking me if she had done something better, would things have turned out different. I keep telling her if she hadn’t been such a wonderful mom, this could have all been so much worse.”

These days he feels faint stirrings that he may be able to redeem himself in the future. He’s writing a new book; it will be acknowledged fiction.