Back to Jayson Blair

I had the pleasure of being on the local NPR program St. Louis on the Air to discuss the new Jayson Blair documentary A Fragile Trust. The show is archived here. The documentary is a look back at what happened with Blair and the New York Times told through interviews with the chief figures at the paper. We hear a lot from Blair himself explaining, as best he could, what happened. Looking back at Blair from the perspective of a decade on, it is notable just how idiosyncratic Blair’s hijinks were, but yet, as I argue in a new Journalism Studies article, he continues to be invoked as a symbol of bad journalism in situations that have nothing to do with what he did.