Reading the New York Observer’s bizarre interview with Jayson Blair and its story on his quest to make money off his own misdeeds brought to mind a few points:
1. I had initially been deeply skeptical of why the U.S. Attorney’s Office would get involved in something like this, where you’d think that Blair had been punished enough by being fired, publicly humiliated, and almost certainly never working in journalism again. Now, I’m not so sure; at a minimum, there’s got to be a way to keep him from laughing all the way to the bank with the proceeds from a book based on his fraud.
2. Consider Blair’s taunt: “I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism . . . They�re all so smart, but I was sitting right under their nose fooling them.” Maybe Tim Blair’s theory was right: “if I worked for the NY Times, I’d be tempted to destroy its credibility too. Here’s to Jayson, the Evil Blair, bringing them down from the inside!.”
3. An alternative and banal explanation for the federal prosecutors’ interest in the case: Blair freely admits he was using cocaine. Let’s say they drop the anvil of a big grand jury investigation on him over the fraud on the Times, then they start asking: hey, maybe you can tell us who your dealer was. A plausible explanation of the feds’ motives? Maybe.