Customer Reviews

Burning Down My Masters' House: My Life at the New York Times

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

In America, convicted criminals are not legally allowed to profit from their crimes. I see no compelling reason why a serial liar like Jayson Blair should somehow be an exception to this rule. Folks, this country has a terrific network of public libraries that would be happy to lend you this book free of charge or, if it is checked out, reserve it in your name. In the meantime, you can read something more rewarding like "Fast Food Nation" or "The Da Vinci Code."

But I digress. Let me tell you why reading this book should be a low priority. Jayson Blair simply is not a credible author. He weaves a few too many fantastic tales here as well as more than a few self-serving ones. The clearest and most credible information presented in the book merely serves to indict him further for being deeply ungrateful.

He never seems to realize that he was presented with a once-in-a-lifetime chance by the New York Times - one which plenty of journalists I know would have given their arm for - one which he blew to high heaven. As to why he blew this so badly, he presents a multiplicity of uncompelling reasons. He attempts to claim that his behavior was far from atypical at the Times but only manages to cite the case of Rick Bragg, whose failure to credit a stringer came out a few weeks after Blair's own pattern was reported. Jayson Blair may be incapable of realizing this - and he certainly does not in his book - but few newspapers would have allowed him a future after Metro Editor Jon Landman's famous memo (to the effect that Blair needed to stop "writing for the Times. Right now.") For whatever reason - and Blair doesn't shed any real light on it - the Times was determined to see no evil where he was concerned. Not only did it fail to act, but in the crucial subsequent year it gave him choice reporting roles in the Washington sniper case and domestic reporting on the Iraq War. This seems a lot less like the racism that Blair purports to have seen than a very ill-starred favoritism. Blair - again - can't recognize this. Where editor Gerald Boyd is concerned, and Boyd was most responsible for tabling Landman's memo and keeping Blair around the paper for that last crucial year, Blair can only manage to be scornful.

Like Stephen Glass' own attempt at writing, Burning Down My Master's House is an embarrassing and sloppy mess of attempts at self-justification (including, as the book's title would indicate, a deeply confused effort to play the race card), half-baked vendettas against old colleagues, and claims that - in light of Blair's known career of deceit - simply aren't credible. If you must read it - if you derive some pleasure from Blair's pathetic tale of self-pity - I guarantee you this: you won't want to read it twice. Make it a library book - you won't regret it.

Holy Moley!! Blair is the narrator of the audio version of his book. He speaks in such a passionless, monotone voice that you run the risk of falling asleep while listening to it in your car. James Earl Jones he's not.

The "victim" approach is not acceptable when you're a discovered liar. This book is nothing more than an attempt to blame the entire Blair disaster on something or someone other than himself. His actions are because he is black, pressured, a drug user, depressed, etc. Reality should set in now, he did what he did because he is a sociopathic liar. If you want to read a book that gives you insight into nothing, this is a good choice.

The two stars rating is solely directed at people interested in the profession of journalism, for whom this car wreck deserves a scan, if not being dwelt upon. That's because journalism professionals ought be familiar with the details of this case as a cautionary tale & to avoid a repeat. For anyone else, I would probably give this one star. It isn't the worst book I've ever read (or, in this case, listened to) but it ain't got a lot to recommend it, either. I'd probably be agitated if I paid for it, but I borrowed the CD set from my Managing Editor, who received it as a donation, so no money wasted. I'd also be agitated if I'd invested much time, but I had to make a couple of seven hour drives anyway.

It was interesting hearing this on CD. Hard to believe it's abridged, as long as it is. It's read by Blair & hearing his voice somehow adds to the experience. He sounds well-educated, arrogant, intellectually lazy ... something really started to wear on me by about the seventh CD.

Writing with the perspective of a recovering alcoholic myself, I believe one of the basic problems is Blair had not advanced very far along the mental road of recovery when he wrote this. He may be physically sober, but his absolute refusal to accept responsibility for just about anything, or to express remorse, or to exercise much insight suggests he has considerable work still to do. I hope for his sake he gets to look back in a few years & be embarrassed he published this.

Blair lists other people's alleged wrongdoings in an apparent effort to justify or minimize his own or at least deflect attention to them. He uses alleged hardships in his life as apparent excuses. We all have hardships and many people overcome ones far worse than those Blair alleges without turning into ungrateful pathological liars.

I'm white, so I understand that I lack qualification to fully grasp racism & the black experience in America. However, it seems to me an extreme stretch to somehow imply, as Blair does, that in being a student at the University of Maryland and then getting an internship followed by a job at The New York Times, that somehow he was a victim of racism. We should all be so lucky. Hundreds, probably thousands, of people of all racial backgrounds would pay dearly just for a chance at the opportunities Blair not only squandered but actually repaid by undermining both the university program he attended & his employer.

In Blair's world, he is at the center of the NYT, at the center of the paper's staff, at the center of his circle of friends. The world revolves around him & his long-suffering girlfriend, about whom we hear way too much. He is terribly impressed with himself. He is impressed with his coverage of the sniper shootings, much of which he describes as limited to watching press conferences on TV & attending press conferences. He somehow seems to imply that he identifies with Malvo, that Malvo isn't such a bad guy for shooting a bunch of people in cold blood, that Malvo (like Blair) is perhaps misunderstood. Spare me.

The book is packed with trivia, name dropping and gossiup that could only possibly interest a small cadre at the NYT but which Blair seems to feel will be of compelling interest to the world.

Some of Blair's account of his career might interest some people unfamiliar with the journey taken by newspaper reporters, but -- again -- it's seriously undermined by Blair's failure to convince that he's changed & isn't still lying. Also, frankly, I don't care about all of the digressions in this book, I care about what Blair did in violating journalistic ethics. That's the only justification for this book to exist & Blair does a very poor job addressing it.

If true, Blair's criticisms of the NYT (specifically, its toe-touch/no touch datelines & failure to credit stringers) are liberties with professional ethics. But the problem is that given Blair's history & given the traversty that is this book, we have no way of knowing whether to give these claims much credibility. When I was actively drinking, I believed pretty much everyone drank as I did. Perhaps when actively lying, Blair believed everyone lied as he did. The problem is one needs time & space before deconstructing these self-delusions & Blair appears to have taken barely any before rushing out this awful book.

I am being exceedingly generous with stars. Do not waste your time if you are not a professional journalist or keenly interested in the media. Then, try to avoid paying for this & use it as a case study in what to avoid.

As a former chemical dependency counselor, I take this piece for what's known in AA/NA as a "war story." That is, he digresses from honest emotion into what amounts to bragging about exploits. Ultimately, drug exploits are tiresome: "I snorted a bunch of cocaine, got it on with a stranger, spent all my money, woke up with a headache, blah, blah, blah."

I also agree with the reviewer who commented that the writing is sloppy and the editing evidently minimal. I had to shut the book for a few minutes after reading about Jayson's seeing the Challenger shuttle hurtle to the earth through his ten-year-old eyes. I cringed with embarrassment as he relays the "touching moment" when his fellow mental hospital patient tells him she "liked black guys in her heyday" and would have gone for him twenty years before. One of many true self-esteem lows that add little to the story!

To say it is poorly written would be too much of a compliment. You don't have to get even halfway through before you can figure out exactly what happened here. Some publishing house obviously offered him a large advance to write a book, and he threw together whatever he could think of off the top of his head, very little of which is probably true, threw in some "woe is me" for cohesion, and tossed it onto the editor's desk. Whether or not anyone even tried to edit this thing, I don't know, but if they did, they should be fired. This is slop, worse than those celebrities who try to "write" books. To think of all the talented people out there who receive small advances and modest printings, while this thing has done better than it ever should have can make you sick to your stomach.

He conned the New York Times. Don't let him con you, too. (...)

The book is riddled with other misrepresentations and errors, great and small, from misspelled names to wrong dates to mistakes that are simply pathetic: For example, he mocks the Times for running a feature about "orchards" found in Central Park. He means orchids.

Blair's inability to get facts straight casts doubt on the accuracy of his book's paragraph-long quotations from long-ago conversations. Especially since we're asked to believe that Blair was drug-addled, mentally unstable and blacked out much of the time. And even that part of his tale is hard to believe.

This book also fails on a more fundamental level: It is badly written and boring, full of long digressions unrelated to his main story. I pity anyone who actually tries to listen to the 10-hour audio version. For Blair, it is yet another dubious achievement: a book that is both evil and dull. Perhaps he should consider another line of work.

The only thing "burning" about this silly, badly written book should be Jayson Blair's ears. However, as he has demonstrated through his multiple television appearances, he is beyond shame.

Many journalists with drug or alcohol problems get help and rebuild their lives, but the first step to that is to accept responsibility for allowing their lives to spin out of control. Blair sees no reason to do that as long as there's the Grey Lady to blame for giving him a job, an expense account, and even car service.

I hope to see Blair, and this appalling book, become a footnote in journalism history. Or perhaps the answer to "Celebrity Burnouts" for $200 on "Jeopardy"!.

Unlike the pieces Jayson Blair "reported" for the New York Times, this laborious account of the aftermath of his infamous crash 'n' burn is way too boring to be anything but the real deal. (Okay, he does try to commit suicide in a coffee shop restroom--but, conveniently, he changes his mind and there are no witnesses.) And despite the book's deliberately inflammatory title, even Blair himself isn't able to work up much of a head of steam that affirmative action somehow played a role in his downfall. Regardless of his race (or his much-touted slave ancestry--what, were his they plagarists, too?), Blair's pathetic tale is not worth revisiting.

"If worse comes to worse," David Carr said to Jayson Blair, "You'll always have the 'Rise and Fall of the Young Black Man' story to tell." Forced to resign from the New York Times, and struggling with drug addiction and manic depression, worse had come to worse. But instead of the suggested title, he called his story "Burning Down My Masters? House."

Jayson Blair joined the infamous rank of journalists caught taking artistic liberties with their reporting. (Stephen Glass of the New Republic had gone so far as to create a web site for a fictitious company mentioned in one of his articles, just in case anyone asked. And Jack Kelly of USA Today became a Pulitzer Prize finalist with a concocted story in which he witnessed a suicide bombing.)

Blair, by his own account, fabricated ?innocent? details for many of his stories, while Mr. Glass and Mr. Kelley fabricated entire articles, presenting works of fiction in place of journalism. He means to say that by contrast, he?s an angel. But in a passage marked by its conflicted inner dialogue (think Gollum), he can?t bring himself to confess to an obvious plagiarism, and the reader is left with an increasing doubt and mistrust.

In other words, don't think that you're buying any kind of confession: he never confronts the issue of integrity in journalism, choosing instead to hover around it, or flirt with other issues such as racism in reporting and management at the Times.

Without a confession, a reason is an excuse and not an apology. And virtually everything is offered as an excuse for his behavior: child abuse (never fully elaborated), bipolar disorder, drug addiction, mental illness, career pressure (compounded by being black), lack of strong management at the Times, and lack of racial sensitivity at the Times.

Full of self-pity, the tale of his downward spiral into drug abuse and career-induced mania culminates in a suicide attempt that seems somehow both fictional and nakedly sincere. But twisted conflict is Jayson Blair?s signature. A complex character born of truths-untold and told-untruths, he seems to be lying when he is not, only because he can barely resist the temptation. His eccentric and paradoxical nature wreaks havoc on reader empathy. For example, in a passage about his eager willingness to self-medicate, he practically seems to be singing a ballad about cocaine, calling it ?she.? Readers doing less than an eight-ball daily could have some trouble relating.

He also seems to have too much interest in how his reader perceives him. Even his word choices seem calculating. For instance, ?aggressive" is meant by the author to be ?assertive? or ?hard-working? even though it can?t be anything else in the context but ?bully.? Or he boasts about being "a walking paradox" while the reader can?t help but think "liar." The end result is that the reader?s attention is never properly directed, the book?s rhythm is broken by the heavy-handedness, and the sacred author-reader trust is abused.

On the plus side, he provides a thought-provoking view on how news is marketed and sold, bringing journalism?s bias (racial, social, and economic) to the reader?s attention. These biases determine how newsworthy a story is, as well as how the story is told. After reading his behind-the-scenes accounts, it?s easy to imagine how a reporter may be tempted to "spice up" a story with details that could easily be true, but aren't. The question of where to draw the line beyond which the editors stop winking and start frowning, become slightly blurred.

Jack Kelley, with his fabricated reports of international intrigue and journalistic privilege missed his career-calling as a spy; Stephen Glass's, with his desire to complete illusions with fake phone messages, post-it notes, and web sites, missed a vocation directing movies. But Jayson Blair, with his penchant for the dramatic, and his inability to distinguish reality from his imagination, probably could have made a good honest living as a novelist.