Hollywood is not a reliable moral arbiter of anything, so it's not surprising that when it holds a mirror up to journalism, Shattered Glass is the result. By Mark Bowden.
In the wake of recent scandals some distinctions are in order. By Richard A. Posner.
"Not defensively, but that the record may be straight, let me say that I did very little faking, although there was no special prejudice against it, so long as the fake wasn't libelous." A reporter looks back at his days as a yellow journalist.
t has been almost a year since I was dismissed as executive editor of The New York Times, a casualty of the turmoil that followed the forced resignation of a troubled young reporter, Jayson Blair, who had fabricated or plagiarized facts and quotations in scores of news stories. I am not going to spend the rest of my life going over the details of the Blair scandal. My intention here is to perform a final service for the newspaper that I worked for and loved for twenty-five years, by revealing the real struggle that was going on behind the scenes at the Times as the Blair scandal played out.
To do so requires me to put on the record both the revitalization strategy that my closest colleagues and I were pursuing at the Times and the underlying analysis of the paper's vulnerabilities that gave us a sense of urgency. This strategy had the support of our publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., who throughout his career has pushed for a Times that guarded its traditions but also sought to make itself smarter, livelier, and more appealing to the geographically diverse and demanding national audience on which its future depends. We believed that the paper's long-term viability required significant improvements in the quality of its journalism—from the calcified front page our new leadership team had inherited on September 5, 2001, to the neglected, underfinanced "soft" sections at "the back of the book." A quiet but intense factional war was going on within the Times, between the senior editors who endorsed these improvements and traditionalists on the newsroom floor and among mid-level managers. The latter group wanted the paper to stay the way it was and took as an insult the animating idea behind our strategy: the idea that "the world's greatest newspaper" is not nearly as good as it could be and ought to be.
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worked for The New York Times for twenty-five years. He is the author of three books, including the best-selling memoir Fly Fishing Through the Mid-life Crisis and My Soul is Rested, an oral history of the civil-rights movement. He won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1992. Copyright 2004 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
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