Waste of Times: how Jayson Blair blew the chance of a lifetime.

• Author: Pomper, Stephen
• Position: Book Review

At one point in his new memoir, Burning Down My Masters' House, disgraced New York Times reporter Jayson Blair reflects on his troubled final days at the paper: "I wished someone like the nun from the movie Airplane would walk in and slap me and tell me to get a hold of myself" If only she had, she might also have told him not to write this book. Memoir is just a bad genre for journalistic frauds like Blair and contemporary fabulist Stephen Glass, whose recent roman a clef about The New Republic was widely panned. These guys have already misled us, betrayed us, and wasted our time. Why should we sit still for another read?

Blair's answer is that his book was motivated by a higher purpose, that he wrote it "in the hope that others who are teetering on the precipice of self-destruction will pull back before it is too late." That sounds like a nice sentiment, but in practice it proves to be completely bogus. The book offers no useful guidance to the young stressed-out professional who might find himself out on a similar ledge. Instead, it throws the author a 300-page pity party, glamorizing his psychotic excesses and heaping calumnies on his former supervisors and colleagues, as if they haven't already suffered enough for his presence in their midst.

But before getting into the full wretchedness of it, let's take a step back to appreciate the big picture. In case you missed all the excitement last spring, Jayson Blair was a young black reporter whose elaborate fabrications, plagiarisms, and other misdeeds dragged The New York Times into a major scandal mad ended the brief editorship of Howell Raines. Burning Down My Masters' House is Blair's effort to tell his side of the story; and to be fair, that story is neither wholly implausible nor even wholly unsympathetic. For example, it does seem likely that Blair was drawn to journalism out of idealism and was disappointed by some of the things he found at the Times (inch as the paper's arguably distant and spotty coverage of the city's non-Yuppie population). Also, it's no doubt true that Blair's bosses were often demanding (as well as unfair and even wrong) and that the Times newsroom was a tough place to work. And I absolutely believe that Blair was a manic depressive who managed his manias with booze and drugs, and that after he went sober those manias drove him into a fugue-like state in which he ultimately self-destructed.

But, let's face it, most of this stuff flails into the "that's life"...