REPORTER WHO RESIGNED LEAVES LONG TRAIL OF DECEPTION

A staff reporter for The New York Times committed frequent acts of
journalistic fraud while covering significant news events in recent months,
an investigation by Times journalists has found. The widespread fabrication
and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in
the 152-year history of the newspaper.

The reporter, Jayson Blair, 27, misled readers and Times colleagues with
dispatches that purported to be from Maryland, Texas and other states, when
often he was far away, in New York. He fabricated comments. He concocted
scenes. He lifted material from other newspapers and wire services. He
selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been
somewhere or seen someone, when he had not.

And he used these techniques to write falsely about emotionally charged
moments in recent history, from the deadly sniper attacks in suburban
Washington to the anguish of families grieving for loved ones killed in Iraq.

In an inquiry focused on correcting the record and explaining how such
fraud could have been sustained within the ranks of The Times, the Times
journalists have so far uncovered new problems in at least 36 of the 73
articles Mr. Blair wrote since he started getting national reporting
assignments late last October. In the final months the audacity of the
deceptions grew by the week, suggesting the work of a troubled young man
veering toward professional self-destruction.

Mr. Blair, who has resigned from the paper, was a reporter at The Times for
nearly four years, and he was prolific. Spot checks of the more than 600
articles he wrote before October have found other apparent fabrications,
and that inquiry continues. The Times is asking readers to report any
additional falsehoods in Mr. Blair's work; the e-mail address is
retrace@nytimes.com.

Every newspaper, like every bank and every police department, trusts its
employees to uphold central principles, and the inquiry found that Mr.
Blair repeatedly violated the cardinal tenet of journalism, which is simply
truth. His tools of deceit were a cellphone and a laptop computer -- which
allowed him to blur his true whereabouts -- as well as round-the-clock
access to databases of news articles from which he stole.

The Times inquiry also establishes that various editors and reporters
expressed misgivings about Mr. Blair's reporting skills, maturity and
behavior during his five-year journey from raw intern to reporter on
national news events. Their warnings centered mostly on the errors in his
articles.

His mistakes became so routine, his behavior so unprofessional, that by
April 2002, Jonathan Landman, the metropolitan editor, dashed off a
two-sentence e-mail message to newsroom administrators that read: "We have
to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now."

After taking a leave for personal problems and being sternly warned, both
orally and in writing, that his job was in peril, Mr. Blair improved his
performance. By last October, the newspaper's top two editors -- who said
they believed that Mr. Blair had turned his life and work around -- had
guided him to the understaffed national desk, where he was assigned to help
cover the Washington sniper case.

By the end of that month, public officials and colleagues were beginning to
challenge his reporting. By November, the investigation has found, he was
fabricating quotations and scenes, undetected. By March, he was lying in
his articles and to his editors about being at a court hearing in Virginia,
in a police chief's home in Maryland and in front of a soldier's home in
West Virginia. By the end of April another newspaper was raising questions
about plagiarism. And by the first of May, his career at The Times was over.

A few days later, Mr. Blair issued a statement that referred to "personal
problems" and expressed contrition. But during several telephone
conversations last week, he declined repeated requests to help the
newspaper correct the record or comment on any aspect of his work. He did
not respond to messages left on his cellphone, with his family and with his
union representative on Friday afternoon.

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.

The investigation suggests several reasons Mr. Blair's deceits went
undetected for so long: a failure of communication among senior editors;
few complaints from the subjects of his articles; his savviness and his
ingenious ways of covering his tracks. Most of all, no one saw his
carelessness as a sign that he was capable of systematic fraud.

Mr. Blair was just one of about 375 reporters at The Times; his tenure was
brief. But the damage he has done to the newspaper and its employees will
not completely fade with next week's editions, or next month's, or next year's.

"It's a huge black eye," said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New
York Times Company and publisher of the newspaper, whose family has owned a
controlling interest in The Times for 107 years. "It's an abrogation of the
trust between the newspaper and its readers."

For all the pain resonating through the Times newsroom, the hurt may be
more acute in places like Bethesda, Md., where one of Mr. Blair's
fabricated articles described American soldiers injured in combat. The
puzzlement is deeper, too, in places like Marmet, W. Va., where a woman
named Glenda Nelson learned that Mr. Blair had quoted her in a news
article, even though she had never spoken to anyone from The Times.

"The New York Times," she said. "You would expect more out of that."

The Deception Reporting Process Riddled With Lies

Two wounded marines lay side by side at the National Naval Medical Center
in Bethesda. One of them, Jayson Blair wrote, "questioned the legitimacy of
his emotional pain as he considered his comrade in the next bed, a runner
who had lost part of his leg to a land mine in Iraq."

The scene, as described by Mr. Blair in an article that The Times published
on April 19, was as false as it was riveting. In fact, it was false from
its very first word, its uppercase dateline, which told readers that the
reporter was in Bethesda and had witnessed the scene. He had not.

Still, the image was so compelling, the words so haunting, that The Times
featured one of the soldier's comments as its Quotation of the Day,
appearing on Page 2. "It's kind of hard to feel sorry for yourself when so
many people were hurt worse or died," it quoted Lance Cpl. James Klingel as
saying.

Mr. Blair did indeed interview Corporal Klingel, but it was by telephone,
and it was a day or two after the soldier had been discharged from the
medical center. Although the corporal, whose right arm and leg had been
injured by a falling cargo hatch, said he could not be sure whether he
uttered what would become the Quotation of the Day, he said he was positive
that Mr. Blair never visited him in the hospital.

"I actually read that article about me in The New York Times," Corporal
Klingel said by telephone last week from his parents' home. "Most of that
stuff I didn't say."

He is confident, for instance, that he never told Mr. Blair that he was
having nightmares about his tour of duty, as Mr. Blair reported. Nor did he
suggest that it was about time, as Mr. Blair wrote, "for another
appointment with a chaplain."

Not all of what Mr. Blair wrote was false, but much of what was true in his
article was apparently lifted from other news reports. In fact, his
1,831-word front-page article, which purported to draw on "long
conversations" with six wounded servicemen, relied on the means of
deception that had infected dozens of his other articles over the last few
months.

Mr. Blair was not finished with his virtual visit to Bethesda. Sgt. Eric
Alva, now a partial amputee, was indeed Corporal Klingel's roommate for two
days. But the sergeant, who is quoted by Mr. Blair, never spoke to him,
said Lt. Cmdr. Jerry Rostad, a medical center spokesman. And a hospitalman
whom Mr. Blair describes as being down the hall, Brian Alaniz, was
discharged five days before Corporal Klingel arrived.

"Our records indicate that at no time did Mr. Blair visit N.N.M.C. or
interview patients," Commander Rostad said.

As he would do in other articles, Mr. Blair appears to have stitched this
narrative by drawing at least partly on information available in the
databases of various news organizations. For example, he describes
Hospitalman Alaniz as someone who "not only lost his right leg, but also
had a finger torn off, broke his left leg and took shrapnel in his groin
and arms." His description seems to mirror one that had appeared in The
Washington Post.

Mr. Blair's deceptive techniques flouted long-followed rules at The Times.
The paper, concerned about maintaining its integrity among readers, tells
its journalists to follow many guidelines as described in a memo on the
newsroom's internal Web site. Among those guidelines: "When we use facts
gathered by any other organization, we attribute them"; "writers at The
Times are their own principal fact checkers and often their only ones"; "we
should distinguish in print between personal interviews and telephone or
e-mail interviews."

In addition, the newspaper uses a dateline only when a reporter has visited
the place.

Mr. Blair knew that rule. In March of last year, an editors' note published
in The Times about an article by another reporter prompted Mr. Blair to
e-mail a colleague the entry in The Times's stylebook about "dateline
integrity." In part, the stylebook explains that a dateline guarantees that
the reporter whose name appears on the article "was at the specified place
on the date given, and provided the bulk of the information."

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.

On April 6, for example, he was supposedly reporting from Cleveland. He
described a church service attended by the Rev. Tandy Sloan, whose missing
son, an Army supply clerk, had been pronounced dead in Iraq the previous
day. There is no evidence that Mr. Blair was either at that service or at
an earlier one also described in his article.

A freelance photographer whom Mr. Blair had arranged to meet outside the
Cleveland church on April 6 found it maddening that he could not seem to
connect with him. The photographer, Haraz Ghanbari, was so intent on a
meeting that he placed nine calls to Mr. Blair's cellphone from 9:32 a.m.
to 2:07 p.m., and kept trying six more times until 10:13 p.m., when he
finally gave up.

Mr. Ghanbari said he managed to reach Mr. Blair three times, and three
times Mr. Blair had excuses for why they could not meet. In one instance,
Mr. Ghanbari said, Mr. Blair explained that he had left the church in the
middle of the service "to get his cellphone fixed" -- that was why so many
of his calls had gone unanswered -- "and was already on his way back."

"I just thought it was weird how he never showed up," Mr. Ghanbari said.

The article that Mr. Blair eventually filed incorporated at least a
half-dozen passages lifted nearly verbatim from other news sources,
including four from The Washington Post.

Some of Mr. Blair's articles in recent months provide vivid descriptions of
scenes that often occurred in the privacy of people's homes but that,
travel records and interviews show, Mr. Blair could not have witnessed.

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.

Mr. Blair described Mrs. Gardner "turning swiftly in her chair to listen to
an anchor report of a Marine unit"; he also wrote about the red, white and
blue pansies in her front yard. In an interview last week, Mrs. Gardner
said Mr. Blair had spoken to her only by phone.

Some Times photo editors now suspect that Mr. Blair gained access to the
digital photos that Doug Mills, the photographer, transmitted that night to
The Times's picture department, including photos of the Gardners watching
the news, as well as the flowers in their yard.

As he often did, Mr. Blair briefed his editors by e-mail about the progress
of his reporting. "I am giving them a breather for about 30 minutes," he
wrote to the national editor, Jim Roberts, at one point, referring to the
Gardners. "It's amazing timing. Lots of wrenching ups and downs with all
the reports of casualties."

"Each time a casualty is reported," he added, "it gets tense and nervous,
and then a sense of relief comes over the room that it has not been their
son's group that has been attacked."

The Gardner family, who had spent considerable time on the phone with Mr.
Blair, were delighted with the article. They wrote The Times saying so, and
their letter was published.

Mr. Roberts was also pleased. He would later identify Mr. Blair's dispatch
from Hunt Valley, Md., as a singular moment: this reporter was
demonstrating hustle and flair. He had no reason to know that Mr. Blair was
demonstrating a different sort of enterprise.

He was actually e-mailing from New York.

The Reporter An Engaging Air, a Nose for Gossip

He got it.

That was the consensus about one of the college students seeking an
internship at The New York Times. He was only 21, but this Jayson Blair,
the son of a federal official and a schoolteacher from Virginia, got what
it meant to be a newspaper reporter.

"I've seen some who like to abuse the power they have been entrusted with,"
Mr. Blair had written in seeking the internship. But, he had added, "my
kindred spirits are the ones who became journalists because they wanted to
help people."

Whether as a student journalist at the University of Maryland or as an
intern at The Boston Globe, the short and ubiquitous Mr. Blair stood out.
He seemed to be constantly working, whether on articles or on sources.
Some, like a fellow student, Catherine Welch, admired him. "You thought,
'That's what I want to be,' " she said.

Others considered him immature, with a hungry ambition and an unsettling
interest in newsroom gossip.

"He wasn't very well liked by the other interns," said Jennifer McMenamin,
another Maryland student who, with Mr. Blair, was a Globe intern in the
summer of 1997. "I think he saw the rest of the intern class as competition."

Citing a U.S. News and World Report researcher, The Washington Post
reported yesterday that while reporting for The Globe, Mr. Blair apparently
lied about having interviewed the mayor of Washington, Anthony Williams.

His interest in journalism dated at least to his years at Centreville High
School, in Clifton, Va., where he asked to interview the new principal for
the school paper within minutes of her introduction to the faculty. "He was
always into the newspaper business, even here," the principal, Pamela Y.
Latt, recalled. "He had a wonderful, positive persistence about him that we
all admired."

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. 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.

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. "He did well," recalled Sheila Rule, a senior editor
who oversees the internship program. "He did very well."

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. The change in assignment took Mr. Landman, Ms. Pinder
and others on the metropolitan desk by surprise.

"Nobody was asking my opinion," Mr. Landman said. "What I thought was on
the record abundantly."

Ms. Pinder, though, said she offered to discuss Mr. Blair's history and
habits with anybody -- mostly, she said, "because we wanted him to succeed."

The Big Time New Assignments for a 'Hungry Guy'

The sniper attacks in suburban Washington dominated the nation's newspapers
last October. "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.

Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd, the managing editor, quickly increased the size of
the team to eight reporters, Mr. Blair among them. "This guy's hungry," Mr.
Raines said last week, recalling why he and Mr. Boyd picked Mr. Blair.

Both editors said the seeming improvement in Mr. Blair's accuracy last
summer demonstrated that he was ready to help cover a complicated,
high-profile assignment. But they did not tell Mr. Roberts or his deputies
about the concerns that had been raised about Mr. Blair's reporting.

"That discussion did not happen," Mr. Raines said, adding that he had seen
no need for such a discussion because Mr. Blair's performance had improved,
and because "we do not stigmatize people for seeking help."

Instead, Mr. Boyd recommended Mr. Blair as a reporter who knew his way
around Washington suburbs. "He wasn't sent down to be the first lead writer
or the second or third or fourth or fifth writer," Mr. Boyd said. "He was
managed and was not thrust into something over his head."

But Mr. Blair received far less supervision than he had on Mr. Landman's
staff, many editors agreed. He was sent into a confusing world of feuding
law enforcement agencies, a job that would have tested the skills of the
most seasoned reporter. Still, Mr. Blair seemed to throw himself into the
fray of reporters fiercely jockeying for leaks and scoops.

"There was a general sense he wanted to impress us," recalled Nick Fox, the
editor who supervised much of Mr. Blair's sniper coverage.

Impress he did. Just six days after his arrival in Maryland, Mr. Blair
landed a front-page exclusive with startling details about the arrest of
John Muhammad, one of the two sniper suspects. The article, attributed
entirely to the accounts of five unidentified law enforcement sources,
reported that the United States attorney for Maryland, under pressure from
the White House, had forced investigators to end their interrogation of Mr.
Muhammad perhaps just as he was ready to confess.

It was an important article, and plainly accurate in its central point:
that local and federal authorities were feuding over custody of the sniper
suspects. But in retrospect, interviews show, the article contained a
serious flaw, as well as a factual error.

Two senior law enforcement officials who otherwise bitterly disagree on
much of what happened that day are in agreement on this much: Mr. Muhammad
was not, as Mr. Blair reported, "explaining the roots of his anger" when
the interrogation was interrupted. Rather, they said, the discussion
touched on minor matters, like arranging for a shower and meal.

The article drew immediate fire. Both the United States attorney, Thomas M.
DiBiagio, and a senior Federal Bureau of Investigation official issued
statements denying certain details. Similar concerns were raised with
senior editors by several veteran reporters in The Times's Washington
bureau who cover law enforcement.

Mr. Roberts and Mr. Fox said in interviews last week that the statements
would have raised far more serious concerns in their minds had they been
aware of Mr. Blair's history of inaccuracy. Both editors also said they had
never asked Mr. Blair to identify his sources in the article.

"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. "If somebody had said,
'Watch out for this guy,' I would have questioned everything that he did. I
can't even imagine being comfortable with going with the story at all, if I
had known that the metro editors flat out didn't trust him."

Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd, who knew more of Mr. Blair's history, also did not
ask him to identify his sources. The two editors said that given what they
knew then, there was no need. There was no inkling, Mr. Raines said, that
the newspaper was dealing with "a pathological pattern of
misrepresentation, fabricating and deceiving."

Mr. Raines said he saw no reason at that point to alert Mr. Roberts to Mr.
Blair's earlier troubles. Rather, in keeping with his practice of
complimenting what he considered exemplary work, Mr. Raines sent Mr. Blair
a note of praise for his "great shoe-leather reporting."

Mr. Blair was further rewarded when he was given responsibility for leading
the coverage of the sniper prosecution. The assignment advanced him toward
potentially joining the national staff.

On Dec. 22, another article about the sniper case by Mr. Blair appeared on
the front page. Citing unidentified law enforcement officials once again,
his article explained why "all the evidence" pointed to Mr. Muhammad's
teenage accomplice, Lee Malvo, as the triggerman. And once again his
reporting drew strong criticism, this time from a prosecutor who called a
news conference to denounce it.

"I don't think that anybody in the investigation is responsible for the
leak, because so much of it was dead wrong," the prosecutor, Robert Horan
Jr., the commonwealth attorney in Fairfax County, Va., said at the news
conference.

Mr. Boyd was clearly concerned about Mr. Horan's accusations, colleagues
recalled. He repeatedly pressed Mr. Roberts to reach Mr. Horan and have him
specify his problems with Mr. Blair's article.

"I went to Jim and said, 'Let's check this out thoroughly because Jayson
has had problems,' " Mr. Boyd said. Mr. Roberts said he did not recall
being told that Mr. Blair had had problems.

Again, no editor at The Times pressed Mr. Blair to identify by name his
sources on the article. But Mr. Roberts said he had had a more general
discussion with Mr. Blair to determine whether his sources were in a
position to know what he had reported.

After repeated efforts, Mr. Roberts reached Mr. Horan. "It was kind of a
Mexican standoff," Mr. Horan recalled. "I was not going to tell him what
was true and what was not true. I detected in him a real concern that they
had published something incorrect."

"I don't know today whether Blair just had a bad source," he continued. "It
was equally probable at the time that he was just sitting there writing
fiction."

Mr. Roberts, meanwhile, said Mr. Horan complained about leaks, and never
raised the possibility that Mr. Blair was fabricating details.

In the end, Mr. Raines said last week, the paper handled the criticisms of
both articles appropriately. "I'm confident we went through the proper
journalistic steps," he said.

It was not until January, Mr. Roberts recalled, that he was warned about
Mr. Blair's record of inaccuracy. He said Mr. Landman quietly told him that
Mr. Blair was prone to error and needed to be watched. Mr. Roberts added
that he did not pass the warning on to his deputies. "It got socked in the
back of my head," he said.

By then, however, those deputies had already formed their own assessments
of Mr. Blair's work. They said they considered him a sloppy writer who was
often difficult to track down and at times even elusive about his
whereabouts. At the same time, he seemed eager and energetic.

Mr. Jones suggested that the newspaper might conduct random checks of the
veracity of news articles after publication. But Tom Rosenstiel, director
of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, questioned how much a
newspaper can guard against willful fraud by deceitful reporters.

"It's difficult to catch someone who is deliberately trying to deceive
you," Mr. Rosenstiel said. "There are risks if you create a system that is
so suspicious of reporters in a newsroom that it can interfere with the
relationship of creativity that you need in a newsroom -- of the trust
between reporters and editors."

Still, in the midst of covering a succession of major news events, from
serial killings and catastrophes to the outbreak of war, something clearly
broke down in the Times newsroom. It appears to have been communication --
the very purpose of the newspaper itself.

Some reporters and administrators did not tell editors about Mr. Blair's
erratic behavior. Editors did not seek or heed the warnings of other
editors about his reporting. Five years' worth of information about Mr.
Blair was available in one building, yet no one put it together to
determine whether he should be put under intense pressure and assigned to
cover high-profile national events.

"Maybe this crystallizes a little that we can find better ways to build
lines of communication across what is, to be fair, a massive newsroom,"
said Mr. Sulzberger, the publisher.

But Mr. Sulzberger emphasized that as The New York Times continues to
examine how its employees and readers were betrayed, there will be no
newsroom search for scapegoats. "The person who did this is Jayson Blair,"
he said. "Let's not begin to demonize our executives -- either the desk
editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher."

Mr. Raines, who referred to the Blair episode as a "terrible mistake," said
that in addition to correcting the record so badly corrupted by Mr. Blair,
he planned to assign a task force of newsroom employees to identify lessons
for the newspaper. He repeatedly quoted a lesson he said he learned long
ago from A. M. Rosenthal, a former executive editor.

"When you're wrong in this profession, there is only one thing to do," he
said. "And that is get right as fast as you can."

For now, the atmosphere pervading the newsroom is that of an estranged
relative's protracted wake. Employees accept the condolences of callers.
They discuss what they might have done differently. They find comfort in
gallows humor. And, of course, they talk endlessly about how Jayson could
have done this.