Please, Make Him Stop
Fabricator Jayson Blair
has written a column for
bp, a magazine for people with bipolar disorder. (Blair, you will remember, was the
New York Times reporter who plagiarized other people's work and claimed to be reporting from places he'd never even visited.)
In the past, Blair has blamed racism for his downfall at the
Times. Now he says it's because he suffers from bipolar disorder. This strikes me as an insult to people who really are the victims of racism or bipolar disorder.
I don't believe that journalists who make mistakes should be driven from the business forever, doomed to life as a publicist or monk. I'm glad that former
New Republic plagiarist Ruth Shalit has been given
a second chance, and I was willing to be open-minded about former New Republic (and George) fabricator Stephen Glass when he returned with a novel,
The Fabulist. But still...would it be so hard to say, "I was young and incredibly ambitious, and I responded by lying and making things up"?
Apparently, yes. Better to blame the disease.
