One of the main focuses of THE WIRE this season is mainstream print journalism, with the theme that "the bigger the lie, the more they believe." A main character in the cast this year is a young white journalist fabricating entire stories on inner city black youth, the Baltimore homeless, a serial killer, and veterans back from serving in Iraq. If the preview for this Sunday's final episode is any indication, dude can expect to get his. And if he were real, a job would be waiting for him at Maxim magazine.
The character seems in part to be based on former NYTimes journalist Jayson Blair. This is an article from a few years back that examines the neoconservative pundit outrage towards Blair, and how that logic could have been applied to various white journalists and historical figures.
[N]ow there is Blair, who confirms (for racists at least) that blacks are a little less honest, a little less truly talented, and taking jobs from more capable whites because of misguided racial preferences; preferences that allow them to get away with fraud or shoddy work in a way that whites presumably never would be allowed to do.
But really now, who are these folks trying to kid?
Whites have been doing our fair share of lying and cheating since long before this nation even became a nation. Indeed, without a healthy dose of both it would have been rather difficult to have become a nation at all.
And when whites lie we are rarely pilloried the way Blair has been as of late, or as Janet Cooke--another black journalist who fabricated stories in the early 1980’s--was. Indeed, in just the last several years, over a half-dozen white journalists have been busted for plagiarism or fabricating stories, some every bit as serious in scope as Jayson Blair, and even at the Times; yet none provoked this kind of outrage.
In fact, one of the guilty parties even has a new book from a major publisher, which provides a somewhat fictionalized but overall lighthearted account of the author’s deceptive exploits.
Of course, there’s nothing particularly unique about light-skinned liars managing to get by without too much damage to their reputations or the shelf lives of the tales they’ve told.
The stock narrative of American history, created by whites to be sure, is nothing but a string of fabrications, after all.
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When he was a reporter in St. Louis, Pat Buchanan took internal FBI memos blasting Martin Luther King Jr. and passed them off as his own work: a form of plagiarism to be sure, but his career was hardly damaged by his lack of ethics.
George Will brags about procuring--one might say pilfering--Jimmy Carter’s 1980 Presidential Debate handbook and passing it on to Reagan so as to prepare him for his televised tête-à-tête with the incumbent. But in Will’s case, an action called theft by those who are intellectually honest hasn’t prevented him from being a respected columnist and commentator whose smug mug we can see each Sunday morning on “This Week.”
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At the end of the day, white America may delude itself into believing that Jayson Blair is the epitome of racial preference run amok, but until we clean out our own stables, filled as they are with liars, cheats, and a plethora of incompetents, we might want to avoid any and all mirrors for a while.
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