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Ten Years Ago A Journalist With The New York Times Committed

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Ten years ago a journalist with the New York Times committed plagiarism on an article. Moreover, it was later found he previously committed plagiarism before that while employed in other writing capacities. Blair attended the University of Maryland where he studied journalism. He interned at The New York Times in 1998 and offered an extended internship. However, he declined the offer of the extended internship to complete more courses before graduating (Bailey, 2008). In 1999 Blair returned to The New York Times as an “ intermediate reporter”. Moreover, according to 30 staff members on The times a letter signed by them in 2003 reported that Blair made four serious errors as a writer and editor that brought his integrity into question…show more content…
Also, it was later found that Blair’s time at prior journalist jobs, as well as, his college newspaper showed similiar questionable behavior, but The Times ignored Blair’s potential for use of unethical journalism methods (Bailey, 2008). In addition, it was later found that Blair 's senior editor warned Blair a number of times about possible plagiarism. However, for whatever reason The Times ignored these warning, stating that they placed complete trust in its employees. In fact The Times compared the paper to other entities replying, “like Every newspaper, like every bank and every police department, we trust our employees to uphold central principles”(Bailey 2008, p.1). However, in many ways The New York Times blind trust policy was unchecked and even promoted Blair’s unethical behavior (Mnookin, 2005).
Jayson Blair’s New York Time’s scandal would never have happened if The Times had a better system of validating and checking for possible plagerism before a story was sent for print. Moreover, as Tannenbaum (2003) mentions in her article there were plagiarism detection tools present that could have been used and would have averted the Blair scandal. The New York Times like other newspapers determined that they did not have to check their writer 's stories for accuracy or possible plagerism.
Unfortunately, Blair crossed the line and ignored the majority of the journalism codes of
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