The Female Jayson Blair?
By now you may have heard about the latest flap at the NYT regarding a piece by reporter Lynette Holloway on record executive Steve Gottlieb. The piece portrayed Gottlieb as a litigious, incompetent boob and managed to hose almost every bit of supporting detail.
In yesterday’s edition the NYT was forced to run a 2100 word correction regarding the article. 2100 words! The original article itself was only 1400 words.
What is fascinating is to think about how many other pieces have been written just like this one where the overall thesis is completely wrong AND almost every detail is somehow hosed too. But no one looked into it or took any objection seriously. The Times couldn’t make such simple mistakes, surely.
I’m going to go out on a limb here to say that this could easily be Jayson Blair II. When you consider the amount of errors made and the types of errors made along with what we know about the Times decades-long goal of diversity in the newsroom, it would be hard to say that she hasn’t done this before.
In fact, I’ll predict that as we speak the Times is going over her past work and coming up with loads of mistakes. Newly minted Editor Bill Keller will be have to deal with this issue, but at least he can say that it happened during Raines’ tenure, not his.
What do we know about Holloway? Well, my Bergian research has come up with a mention from Walter Williams:
Jesse Jackson said, "This is a replay of Selma all over again." He yelled that "Holocaust survivors have been disenfranchised." Jackson spoke of the "blood of blacks and Jews." Not one mainstream news media outfit challenged Jackson to substantiate his claims either at the time of the Florida recount or since. In the midst of the Florida folderol, despite Jackson's ranting, New York Times correspondent Lynette Holloway wrote, "Mr. Jackson has been careful not to be inflammatory."
We also know that she seems to write a lot about minority issues. Is she black? We don’t know, but I am inclined to think so. Does it matter? In light of what happened with Blair it has to.
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