Let’s clear a few hurdles before getting down to the business of reviewing “Burning Down My Masters’ House,” Jayson Blair’s account of his very public self-destruction at The New York Times, which sparked a bruising investigation of newsroom policies and the resignation of the two top editors.
Let’s get past the distasteful notion that Blair, 27, already has made a reported $250,000 for writing this book about how he made up all or part of dozens of news stories. Profiting from misdeeds is an American tradition.
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Let’s concede that race is going to be an issue. It always is.
And let’s approach this book with an open mind, assuming that it is indeed, as billed, a work of nonfiction.
The book begins on a perversely appealing note:
“I lied and I lied, and then I lied some more.
“I lied about where I had been, I lied about where I had found information, I lied about how I wrote the story.”
The past tense would lead you to believe that Blair is done lying, that he’s going to come clean and offer some true insight into the mind of a serial liar.
But don’t fall for it.
What follows Blair’s initial mea culpa is 290 pages of self-delusional whining and ranting, sometimes simultaneously, in which Blair blames virtually everyone in the Times organization and society at large for his downfall. It is difficult not only to fathom but to read.
There are pointless digressions into the history of his hometown of Columbia, Md., descriptions of his fellow patients in rehab and many more passages one has to guess were included simply to pad this out to respectable book length.
Blair is in no man’s land. He is a journalist without a shred of credibility. Admitting the magnitude of his deceptions over two years at The New York Times makes a reasonable reader parse every word of his account.
Did he really suffer sexual abuse as a child? Did he truly think about committing suicide in a Greenwich Village cafe on the night before he resigned from the Times? Calling this book “self-serving” isn’t nearly enough. The tone is occasionally confessional, but huge portions of the book are attacks–on several senior editors, on peers whom Blair believes stood in his way and on the “cutthroat culture” at the Times “that leaves no rivals standing.”
Blair admits that he faked his first story in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when he filed an interview with a victim he called Andrew Rosstein.
“I improvised by creating a last name for him,” he writes. “I had lifted quotes from other papers before, but never made something up.”
Once on that slippery slope, Blair’s slide was fast and furious. At The New York Times, a memo from Executive Editor Bill Keller and managing editors Jill Abramson and Bill Geddes was circulated among the staff, saying that Blair’s book “does not merit much attention” and that they have no intention of responding to the author or his book.
Thomas Viner, head of the book’s publisher, New Millennium Press, has come out swinging, blasting the Times editors’ comments as the start of “an ongoing campaign to do anything they can to hurt Jayson and his credibility.”
His credibility? No comment.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Victoria Rodriguez ([email protected])