The American Spectator

And what about other inexperienced 27-year-old hot shots the Times has championed? One is Jodi Kantor, whom the paper recently hired away from Slate to become editor of its “prestigious” Arts & Letters section. “Kantor may be fabulous and do a remarkable job, but no minority has ever gotten a break like that in the history of American journalism,” Neal writes. So that’s what he’s left with in the wake of Blair, grievance?

A writer for the Wall Street Journal yesterday would probably agree with Neal regarding different reactions to white journalist scandals and those of a Jayson Blair. The former never implicate whites in general the way the latter are more likely to in the case of diversity-labeled blacks. “Race-based policies make black achievement a white allowance and black failure a group stigma,” he writes. “Which is why so many black journalists hung their heads at the revelation of Mr. Blair’s race.”

To Terry Neal’s credit, he’s not about to hang his head.

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p> The Short, Troubled Reign of Raines (posted 5/12/03 2:43 a.m.) br> Just the other month the New York Times published an op-ed by a CNN honcho that read like a suicide note from the credibility-challenged cable network. Now it has published a much longer if similar note about itself and the Jayson Blair affair. Or maybe one should say it’s just dropped the big one on itself. It’ll take days and weeks and longer to assess the fallout. If executive editor Howell Raines were at Enron, his name would be Kenneth Lay. /p>

Sunday’s report of its investigation into the Blair scandal simply takes one’s breath away. Let’s start with what’s said. The paper concedes that reporter Blair committed countless acts of plagiarism, misrepresentation, and other deviousness over the course of his meteoric Times career. It admits Blair was appointed and promoted by the paper’s top guns, despite warnings from less powerful editors at the paper (which immediately puts the lie to its official claim that what the paper had here was a failure to communicate). It denies any of this had anything to do with its open championing of affirmative action, the elephant in the room it mistakes for a gnat.

NPR’s “All Things Considered,” of all networks, recently posed this question to Raines, as recorded by the Media Research Center’s Times Watch: