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This was made possible, says Mnookin, by Alabamian Howell Raines's rise to executive editor of the New York Times. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was obsessed with diversity, and Raines aimed to give it to him. The promise to elevate black assistant managing editor Gerald Boyd to the number two slot was part of Raines's long Absalom-like campaign to take over when Joseph Lelyveld retired. Though the relationship between Boyd and Blair is still not entirely clear, the second-in-command did go to bat for the young reporter on a few occasions, which proved useful to Blair when other reporters were calling for his head because of his high error rate.

BLAIR NOT ONLY SURVIVED his scrapes with section editors, he eventually was posted to cover the D.C. sniper mania of 2002. He "broke" several stories about the case and helped to shatter the Times's credibility in the process. Relying on multiple anonymous sources, Blair said that the police's working picture differed wildly from what they were telling the rest of the press -- including the howler that John Lee Malvo, not John Mohammad, was the principal triggerman. The coverage earned an attaboy from Raines and helped to shore Blair up against most criticism.

Upon discovering that Blair had not only plagiarized material from other sources, but given up travel to pound out pieces in his filthy New York apartment, inventing details to fill in the gaps, most papers would have sacked the reporter, run a correction or two, and brazened out the media firestorm. But this was the New York Times -- the so-called paper of record -- and this challenge to its infallibility could not stand.

In an action that moved the London Spectator's press critic to label it "the most arrogant newspaper in the world," the Times launched a massive investigation and published two whole pages detailing some of Blair's deceptions. About half of the stories that he wrote while working on the national beat were found to contain fraudulent or lifted material, and it's possible that the full extent of Blair's phoniness went much deeper. Given the time constraints, reporters touched only a portion of his 600-plus stories since he landed at the paper.

The Blair scandal set off a series of angry reactions that led to Howell Raines's resignation only 20 months after he had taken control of the Times. The story has been told before but never so well. Mnookin's diligent reconstruction allows readers to be a fly on the wall as we watch the young reporter and the old editor come undone.

p> Jeremy Lott is the foreign press critic for GetReligion.org. This article appeared in the December 2004/January 2005 issue of The American Spectator . To subscribe to The American Spectator , click here. br> /p>

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