Jayson Blair Talks: ‘So Jayson Blair Could Live, The Journalist Had to Die’
“That was my favorite,” Jayson Blair said. It was the morning of Monday, May 19, and the disgraced former New York Times reporter was curled in a butterfly chair in his sparsely furnished Brooklyn apartment. He was eating a bagel and talking about one of his many fabricated stories—his March 27 account, datelined Palestine, W.Va., of Pvt. Jessica Lynch’s family’s reaction to their daughter’s liberation in Iraq.I don’t know, but I think this guy’s fucked in the head. I haven’t commented on the Blair thing yet because, well, I haven’t had time or really cared, but I think I may have something to say later. Off to work.Mr. Blair hadn’t gone to Palestine, W.Va. He’d filed from Brooklyn, N.Y. As he’d done before, he cobbled facts and details from other places and made some parts up. He wrote how Private Lynch’s father had “choked up as he stood on the porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures.”
That was a lie. In The Times’ lengthy May 11 account of Mr. Blair’s long trail of deception, it reported that “the porch overlooks no such thing.”
Mr. Blair found this funny.
