Mr. Jones suggested that the newspaper might conduct random checks of the veracity of news articles after publication. During his 10-week internship at The Times, in the summer of 1998, Mr. Blair wrote 19 news articles, helped other reporters and never seemed to leave the newsroom. By April, Mr. Raines recalled, senior editors were discussing whether Mr. Blair should be considered for a permanent slot on the national reporting staff. On March 24, for example, he filed an article with the dateline Hunt Valley, Md., in which he described an anxious mother and father, Martha and Michael Gardner, awaiting word on their son, Michael Gardner II, a Marine scout then in Iraq.
or interview patients," Commander Rostad said. The Times offered him a slot in an internship program that was then being used in large part to help the paper diversify its newsroom. But for many photographers assigned to work with Mr. Blair, he was often just a voice on the phone, one saying he was on his way or just around the corner. He added: "There has never been a systematic effort to lie and cheat as a reporter at The New York Times comparable to what Jayson Blair seems to have done." WHAT: Jayson Blair advanced quickly during his tenure at The New York Times, where he was hired as a full-time staff writer after his internship there and others at The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.Even accusations of inaccuracy and a series of corrections to his reports on Washington, D.C.-area sniper attacks did not stop Blair from moving on to national coverage of the war in Iraq. Mr. Blair continued to make mistakes, requiring more corrections, more explanations, more lectures about the importance of accuracy. The reporting for this article included more than 150 interviews with subjects of Mr. Blair's articles and people who worked with him; interviews with Times officials familiar with travel, telephone and other business records; an examination of other records including e-mail messages provided by colleagues trying to correct the record or shed light on Mr. Blair's activities; and a review of reports from competing news organizations. Tandy Sloan, whose missing son, an Army supply clerk, had been pronounced dead in Iraq the previous day. The plan, he said, was for Mr. Roberts to give Mr. Blair a two- or three-month tryout in the mid-Atlantic bureau to see if he could do the job. "I can't imagine accepting unnamed sources from him as the basis of a story had we known what was going on," Mr. Fox said. "This was a `flood the zone' story," Mr. Roberts, the national editor, recalled, invoking the phrase that has come to embody the paper's aggressive approach to covering major news events under Mr. Raines, its executive editor. It was just two days earlier that an editor at the San Antonio Express News told the New York Times, where Jayson Blair worked, that Blair had lifted passages from them for a story about the family of a missing Iraqi War veteran.Blair’s resignation meant that he was done with the New York Times, but the New York Times was clearly not done with Jayson Blair. "I went to Jim and said, `Let's check this out thoroughly because Jayson has had problems,' " Mr. Boyd said. Why, despite warning signs, was he allowed to rack up such a trail of deceit before finally being caught by an outside reporter?The Times has never been able to provide truly compelling answers to those questions but what is obvious is that other newspapers are constantly making the same mistakes that made The Times so vulnerable.
"It's what we are and what we sell." At the same time, though, many at The Times grew fond of the affable Mr. Blair, who seemed especially gifted at office politics. In e-mail messages to colleagues, for example, he conveyed the impression of a travel-weary national correspondent who spent far too much time in La Guardia Airport terminals.
Mr. Boyd was clearly concerned about Mr. Horan's accusations, colleagues recalled. He also wrote that Private Lynch's family had a long history of military service; it does not, family members said. Mr. Blair's Times supervisors and Maryland professors emphasize that he earned an internship at The Times because of glowing recommendations and a remarkable work history, not because he is black.
That arrogance blinded me to a lot of my weaknesses.”It began small, Blair remembered. "He works the way he lives — sloppily," he recalled telling Mr. Boyd, who said last week he had agreed that Mr. Blair was not the best candidate for the job. Mr. Blair had just moved to the sports department when he was rerouted to the national desk to help in the coverage of the sniper case developing in his hometown area.
Still, Mr. Blair seemed to throw himself into the fray of reporters fiercely jockeying for leaks and scoops.