in truth...
A nice first-person piece on the whole J*yson Blair ballyhoo. I think objectively that Sarah Hepola is an excellent essayist; emotionally, I feel very connected to her, for whatever reason. (On that personal level, I'm worried that he was liberally buying her drinks after she had already professed to having a problem with alcohol, and then trying to hit on her. Not only didn't she acknowledge how sleazy that was in the essay, she doesn't seem to have necessarily realized it at all -- she still speaks of him in such a wistful tone. I think it makes him look like a total dickhead. But whatever.)

On a professional level, though, there's a lot to be said about the Blair stuff. It's bad for journalists, especially young journalists, especially young minority journalists. It's bad all around. I know some people who worked with him on their school paper, and they all seem to say that he was very charismatic and driven, and also very shady, and none of them are very surprised. The scope of it blows my mind -- the massive spread in the Times attests to the sheer number of his transgressions, which, in my mind is really the biggest problem. How could there not be more checks and balances at one of the nation's best papers? It's easy to get wrapped up in the story of this one person, this one scandal, but it's the institutional failure that's more interesting to me. Just one tiny apsect: The post-Deep Throat culture of unnamed sources is so pervasive that a 27-year-old reporter can make up whole armies of masked internal sources without anyone questioning how he had access to them. Gah.

There's already so little trust in the media, and now there's even less. When you look at the state of the nation's media outlets in general, it's not hard to figure out why, but individual reporters should be exempt from that in some respects. There are so many -- SO many -- truly good journalists out there working unbelievably hard to make the world a decent place, to hold its leaders accountable, to get information to the public, to document people's lives. I work with a lot of them. And I see the frustration, and every time some big scandal happens it just adds to the burden of an already pretty thankless job. So disheartening.