Blair's Ashes

Burning Down My Masters' House
Jayson Blair
New Millennium Press

If journalism is a religion, Jayson Blair is surely the Antichrist.

Most journalists have approached Blair’s new memoir, Burning Down My Masters’ House (New Millennium Press), as they might approach a leper whose sins have rendered him beyond redemption. Blair, who plagiarized and fabricated dozens of stories for The New York Times and subsequently upended the world’s most respected newspaper, is undoubtedly the most hated man in journalism.

In advance of the memoir’s release, top Times editors assured staff in a brief memo, “We don’t intend to respond to Jayson or his book.” Elsewhere, visceral contempt for Blair—the sinner and his sins—has clouded most attempts to assess the memoir. And in that sense, Blair’s otherwise-sleazy title rings true. The pain he has inflicted upon journalists is visceral. This heretic has momentarily shattered the house of worship.

For his own part, Blair says he is a “practicing agnostic” and clearly views himself as a throwback to an earlier era of journalism, when reporters seemed to type with one hand and sip brandy with the other, wiping away cigar ash from pages of fresh copy. Blair twice refers to the 1994 classic, The Paper, which is itself a throwback and perhaps the greatest newspaper film ever made. And as he recalls his reporting for the Times metro desk, Blair often assumes an annoyingly theatrical tone to mimic the gritty feel of The Paper. “I soon found myself deep in the woods,” he writes, “cutting a path through American and English elms as I walked toward the area where I saw the most police activity.” The memoir even dares to end where it begins, a rhetorical device which ultimately feels like a shameless ploy for movie licensing rights.

Any celebrity memoir, of course, is liable to allegations of self-promotion, but Blair’s story permits him one legitimate justification for publishing this nearly 300-page treatise: an apology. Blair does apologize, but he couches the mea culpa in so many excuses that he hardly seems repentant. Among his many rationalizations, Blair blames a hostile environment at the Times and an escalating addiction to cocaine. But readers would have more sympathy for Blair’s latter excuse, at least, if he didn’t seem to take pride in his vices. Responding to an editor who asked, “Was Jayson drunk when he wrote that?” Blair writes, “In fact, I was drunk and high.”

And so begins Blair’s descent into unending deceit, occurring simultaneously with his own mental breakdown—or so he tells us—and eventual suicide attempt, which Blair recounts in the book’s most powerful moment. “I looked up at the strong metal hinge in the bathroom and saw nothing but relief,” he writes. “I wrapped the leather around my neck. It felt cold and slightly sticky, but I did not jerk from it. I felt out of my body.” Given the strident title of Blair’s memoir, it’s hard not to view this scene as a potent self-lynching. Indeed, while the veracity of Blair’s account is necessarily dubious, he is still a talented writer: his memoir often succeeds even as fiction.

But while Blair purports to set his narrative in the larger framework of the black experience, as a work of African-American studies, his memoir is largely vapid. Most incredulously, he refers incorrectly to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man three times, adding an article to the title and therefore inadvertently—and inexcusably—alluding to H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man.

When Blair proposes parallels between him and accused D.C.-sniper John Lee Malvo, whose shooting spree he covered—fraudulently—for the Times, Blair’s thesis is intriguing, but his analysis is weak. The only link Blair can muster is their shared slave ancestry, the potential starting point for an argument which requires far more space to unfurl than he allows. And, in a particularly ineffective passage, Blair goes after Gerald Boyd, the black managing editor who was forced to resign, along with Managing Editor Howell Raines, in the wake of Blair’s fabrications. 

Instead of launching vague assaults against editors at the Times, Blair could have quite legitimately dealt with the widely-recognized dearth of black reporters in American newsrooms, including the Times. Of the Old Grey Lady’s 25 political reporters, only one, Lynette Clemetson, is black, and she joined the team this January. And while the Times purports to maintain a finger on the pulse of New York, Brent Staples is the sole black person on its 15-member editorial board. These sorts of numbers would have bolstered Blair’s claims. Instead, he resorts to generalities upon which Ralph Ellison—or, hell, even H.G. Wells—would surely frown.

Blair’s more substantial allegations of misdeeds at the Times—including a serious charge of widespread dateline fraud—are not likely to raise the right eyebrows, given the source. But Blair’s memoir, though doomed from the start, is a surfeit of fascinating concepts and compelling narrative which displays the talent that once served him so well at the Times. Too bad, then, that the author is unemployed—and unbelievable.

[This review originally appeared Friday, March 12, 2004 in The Arts section of The Harvard Crimson.]