[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27658-2003May7.html[/url]
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 8, 2003; Page C01
Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who resigned last week after plagiarizing a story about a woman whose son died in Iraq, never talked to two other soldiers' parents he quoted in separate articles, the parents said in interviews this week.
The Rev. Tandy Sloan, an associate minister at a Cleveland church whose son was killed in Iraq, said he did not meet or speak to Blair, despite the fact that the reporter published his comments and described him at a church service.
"The article he wrote was totally erroneous," Sloan said. "He hadn't talked to me. He fabricated the whole story, is basically what he did."
Gregory Lynch, the father of Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the former POW who was rescued by U.S. forces, said Blair "was never at my house and never spoke to me." Blair had begun a story in March -- datelined Palestine, W.Va. -- by writing that Lynch "choked up as he stood on his porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures, and declared that he remained optimistic." No tobacco fields or cows can be seen from the house, Lynch said, only a couple of chickens.
An attorney in the Washington sniper case quoted by Blair also said he never spoke to the reporter. And Pete Mahoney, associate athletic director at Kent State University, said a quote that Blair attributed to him in December was "very embarrassing," and although the reporter had left a message for him, "I never had a chance to talk to him."
These accounts indicate that the story that prompted Blair's resignation, far from being an isolated incident, was part of a pattern in which the 27-year-old reporter repeatedly fabricated material for Times stories.
Times Executive Editor Howell Raines said yesterday that it was "a maddening situation when you have someone who violates professional ethics. It's really stricken all of us." He said he has five reporters and three editors investigating Blair's stories over the past four years, which included 50 corrections, by reinterviewing sources and examining travel and phone records.
Raines said he has "serious doubts -- and that's an understatement" that Blair visited some of the cities he claimed to be writing from.
"I wish we had caught it earlier, but we didn't," Raines said. "Frankly, no newspaper in the world is set up to monitor for cheats and fabricators."
Jonathan Landman, the paper's metropolitan editor, said Blair was hired as part of an intermediate reporter program in 1999, after a summer internship the year before, and that the paper had been aware of his substandard record.
An editor at the Boston Globe, where Blair had previously interned, told the Times that Blair's work had been good but that he had "very sharp elbows and was not liked by the other interns," Raines said. At the Times, he said, Blair "became a very popular and well-liked figure among his peers."
From 1998 to 2000, Raines said, Blair's annual correction rate ranged from 5 to 6.3 percent -- high enough to bring explicit warnings that he had to improve.
Blair graduated from the apprentice program in 2001. Still, Landman said, he wrote Blair an "unusually long, unusually detailed" letter early last year that "gave a great deal of attention to his corrections and his erratic behavior -- not showing up, being unreachable."
Landman said he also told Blair in a letter one year ago that, "in essence, your job is to learn to do things right. The idea was to slow him down and make him focus on accuracy," even if he wrote only one brief story a week.
But there were more problems. Blair's correction rate shot up to 16 percent in an eight-month period beginning shortly before Sept. 11, 2001, when Blair lost a relative in the attack on the Pentagon. Raines said he entered the employee assistance program for several weeks.
In April 2002, Raines said, Blair was told by letter that he was in "an employment-threatening situation." But eventually "there was a great deal of improvement," Landman said, and Blair's correction rate over the past eight months declined to 1.9 percent.
"What we didn't know was that he was developing another problem we didn't know about, a problem of plagiarism and deception," Raines said.
Blair quit over his April 26 profile of Juanita Anguiano of Los Fresnos, Tex., the mother of a missing soldier who later died in Iraq. Blair had lifted quotes and details about her home from the San Antonio Express-News, and Anguiano later told Times editors that she had never spoken to Blair.
In the Cleveland case, Blair appeared to lift substantial material from a story by Washington Post reporter Tamara Jones.
In a March 29 report, Jones described the Historic Greater Friendship Baptist Church as being unusually "packed" for a Wednesday night, its worshipers including "genteel ladies pressed hat brim to hat brim," "a tattooed biker in studded leather and chains," "a police dispatcher in uniform," "a soldier in battle dress uniform" and a man "in an elegant gray suit and tie."
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