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May
13, 2003
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May
13, 2003
Fraud at the New York Times
Blaming
Blacks for White Folks Mistakes
By THE BLACK COMMENTATOR
The New York Times should be ashamed of itself
for abrogating "the trust between the newspaper and its
readers," as chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. put it.
But the Jayson Blair affair is the least of the newspaper's transgressions
against truth. Racism, not affirmative action, is what ails the
Times.
By rights, the Times' embarrassment should
be of no collective concern to Black people. Whites control every
important aspect of the publication's decision making. White
management devised their own version of what they chose to call
affirmative action, hiring those Blacks that appealed to their
corporate tastes. Black people in general bear no responsibility
for white people's hiring decisions. Yet, in the wake of 27-year-old
Blair's alleged plagiarisms and fictions, media racists immediately
sought to somehow blame the very concept of affirmative action
for what is, at root, just another instance of white management
incompetence. "Affirmative action" didn't hire Blair,
and Blair didn't hire and assign himself--white management did.
There is a deeper current underlying
this story, one that allows the Times to escape its own responsibilities
by hiding behind supposed good intentions. The paper poses as
a social do-gooder, when in reality it is an unreconstructed
bigot. The Times needs an affirmative action program because
it does a terrible job of hiring competent Black reporters, many
hundreds of whom are willing and able to perform the corporate
mission. The same racism that has historically prevented the
Times from sufficiently staffing itself with minorities also
causes it to hire the wrong candidates. White people have been
screwing up affirmative action since before the term was coined,
sometimes on purpose, more often through an inability to objectively
assess non-whites--one of the definitions of racism.
Assault on The Gray
Lady
The Blair denouement was bigger news
than a thousand dead Iraqis. Basically, the story was framed
as an affirmative action-induced erosion of standards at the
highest levels of journalism--an assault on American media integrity
as represented by The New York Times. Blacks were having their
corrupt way with the Gray Lady--a symbol of white intelligence
and competence as potent in some respects as Lady Liberty, a
few miles south of Times Square.
The starting point of American racism
is the assumption that white people and their institutions represent
the proper, normative standards against which all other people
and institutions are judged. Once the white normative assumption
is internalized, a racist worldview flows from it as surely as
water to the sea, polluting every social space in its path.
The logic of this seminal assumption
dictates that people hired by the New York Times are either gifted
human beings, or people who have been bestowed a gift. It is
a circular kind of logic, since the Times has the power to set
standards based on--itself.
The New York Times functions as a corporate
arbiter of white American discourse. We gain vital clues to the
workings of white corporate minds by noting the content and treatment
of "All the News That's Fit to Print." We do not learn
what is actually important, but only what the Times deems important
enough to publish. And that's critical to know, if only to understand
how the mighty think, and what they think about.
Those who are shackled by racist assumptions
are led to conclude that a Black person fortunate enough to measure
up to the standards of The New York Times--one who is privileged
to breathe that rarified white air--carries a double obligation.
He must prove that the brilliant whites who hired him picked
the right Black person for the job, and he must insure by his
comportment in the position that other white institutions will
hire more Blacks to assist them in their corporate mission.
Should the Black candidate--a person
picked by whites--fail, it is the aspirations of Black people
as a whole for upward mobility that are made to seem unreasonable,
ridiculous, even criminal. This is white mischief at its most
automatic and insidious.
Jayson Blair failed his white folks,
giving the New York Times a "huge black eye," as Sulzberger
said with a straight face. The Times compiled a 7,500-word account
of the Blair affair, essentially concluding that the newspaper
had allowed its good intentions to be "betrayed" by
a bad Black.
Lunatics control the
asylum
Nowhere has the newspaper acknowledged
that Blair was an affirmative action hire--this is simply assumed
to be the case. In one sense, however, all Black recruitment
at historically white work environments is affirmative action,
in that it is reluctant hiring--white people doing what does
not come naturally, and is against their distorted judgment.
Persons who are reluctantly hired are often reluctantly supervised
and not mentored at all. It is crystal clear that Jayson Blair
was not part of any formal or informal "team" at the
New York Times. Had he been connected with the life of the paper,
half his stories would not have later been found to be bogus
in some respect, including "frequent acts of journalistic
fraud." Blair acted utterly alone.
Yes, there is something inherently wrong
with affirmative action as practiced in the United States and
at The New York Times: white people still make all the decisions.
The perpetrators of the historical crime, the people whose delusional
worldviews created the societal distortions that plague Black
America in the first place--the same people that make the New
York Times an unfit interpreter of reality--remain the arbiters
of societal standards, values, and hiring. They decide what is
"Fit to Print," and who is fit to engage in the process.
Let them live with their choice of Jayson Blair--that's white
folks' business.
African Americans did not craft the New
York Times affirmative action program, nor are there enough Blacks
in the organization to decisively influence the paper's editorial
or workplace policies. Blair's alleged transgressions are proof
only that the New York Times is a bad judge of Black people--as
is normal among racists.
African Americans should not be drawn
into a conversation based on the assumption that The New York
Times sets a high standard for journalism, or that the paper's
white managers are capable of recognizing any aspect of reality
whatsoever, in hiring decisions or news judgments. Black people
bear no onus for white incompetence in selecting Black people
to carry out white corporate missions.
Petty frauds and mega-lies
The New York Times violates truth, every
day, with no assistance from African Americans. Jayson Blair
is accused of writing stories about people he had not spoken
to, and places he had not been. For this, he is crucified, and
made a symbol of Black pretensions. The Great White Liar William
Safire wonders, "How could this happen at the most rigorously
edited newspaper in the world?" Yet Blair's misdeeds, so
innocuous that he could commit 36 of them before being caught,
pale when compared to the Stalinist crime against reality perpetrated
by valued Timesman Adam Nagourney, May 5, in full view of the
paper's editors.
Nagourney was entrusted to divine the
larger truths that emerged from the televised Democratic primary
debate, in South Carolina. Instead, as BC noted in last week's
issue, he disappeared three of the candidates:
"Nagourney then proceeded to delineate
the opposing Democratic camps, comprising six of the nine candidates:
Lieberman, Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt, Dean and Graham. In over
1,000 words, Nagourney not only failed to once mention the names
Al Sharpton, Carole Moseley-Braun or Dennis Kucinich, he did
not indicate in any manner that the three candidates existed
on the planet Earth! The two Blacks and one lefty white did not
rate even a throwaway line about the "others" vying
for primary votes. The fact that they lived and breathed was
not deemed fit to print--an amazing but honest exposition of
the world as it should be in the judgment of the New York Times
and corporate media, in general."
The New York Times erased three important
politicians from a nationally televised event in which they were
full participants, leaving not a trace of their presence in the
Newspaper of Record. Presumably, the editors were pleased. Stalin's
scissors men would have been proud.
One of the disappeared, Sharpton, is
likely to come in first or second in South Carolina, next February.
Will Times readers wonder how and why that happened? "It's
an abrogation of the trust between the newspaper and its readers,"
said Times chairman Sulzberger. But he was talking about Jayson
Blair's little tricks and inventions, not Adam Nagourney's racial
and political mutilation of a nationally significant event. Jason
Blair invented quotes of transient interest from rather unimportant
people. Adam Nagourney whited out a national debate.
The Times vastly underestimated the October
26 anti-war march in Washington, reporting that turnout was only
in the "thousands," far "below expectations."
Actually, between 100,000 (police estimate) and 200,000 (Pacifica's
count) people gathered that Saturday on the Mall for a protest
of global, historic impact. It took a monsoon of emailed complaints
to prompt the Times to issue a corrective story on the following
Wednesday, confirming that the huge turnout had served to "Invigorate
the Antiwar Movement."
Times Executive Editor Howell Raines
neglected to assemble a task force to investigate "how such
fraud could have been sustained within the ranks of The New York
Times" by reporter Lynette Clemetson, an assassin of history,
itself. Such language is reserved for petty revisionists, like
Blair.
The Times prints only the news that fits
its version of reality, and discards the rest. It now pillories
Jayson Blair for doing the same thing, piecemeal.
We think he is a Timesman, after all.
The
Black Commentator is one
of CounterPunch's favorite websites. We encourage all of you
to bookmark the site and become regular visitors. The editors
can be reached at: publisher@blackcommentator.com
Today's
Features
Michael
Neumann
Has Islam Failed? Not by Western
Standards
Uri
Avnery
My Meeting with Arafat
Steve Perry
The Saudi Arabia Bombing
Jacob
Levich
Democracy Comes to Iraq: Kick Their Ass and Grab Their Gas
William
Lind
The Hippo and the Mongoose: a Question of Military Theory
Saul
Landau
Clear Channel Fogs the Airwaves
Stew Albert
Asylum
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