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May 10, 2003
New York Times Comes Clean on "Fabrication and Plagiarism"
"A staff reporter for The New York Times committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering significant news events in recent months, an investigation by Times journalists has found. The widespread fabrication and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper."
The New York Times report on the Jasyon Blair plagiarism/falsehood debacle is fascinating reading in all sorts of ways.
We get a look inside the way the NYT operates, witness a ton of dysfunction of the sort with which anyone who's ever worked in a large organization is familiar, we get a team of reporters who are surely cognizant of the need their publication has for them to get the story as right as they possibly can, and if we remember any of the articles Blair filed that we may have accepted as fact, we get a sense of the fragility of what we can claim to know.
Registration required, but this one is worth it. I've made my one "for personal use" PDF of it, and intend to spend some time re-reading it this weekend.
Comments
http://live.curry.com/stories/2002/05/08/theBigLie.html
"I've been in the public eye for more than 18 years, in Europe and the US. I've enjoyed fame and recognition, which comes at a price.
That price isn't privacy, as many would have you believe, the price is the cost of the truth. I've been interviewed hundreds of times. By broadcasters, publications, newspapers, magazines, school papers. You name it, they've interviewed me. Not once, ever, has the result been factually correct."Posted by: Ed at May 10, 2003 9:10 PM