Blair: 'I wish the rolling heads had stopped with mine'
Disgraced reporter comments on editors' resignations
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New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd resign in the wake of scandal. CNN's Jason Carroll reports (June 5)
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| HOW IT CAME TO THIS |
Resignations of The New York Times' Executive Editor Howell Raines, Managing Editor Gerald Boyd
• May 1: Jayson Blair, a reporter, resigns from The Times after the newspaper finds fraud, plagiarism and inaccuracies in 36 of his 73 articles.
• May 22: A committee of 20 Times staffers and two outside news executives is named to review newsroom policies in what the Times calls "a low point in the 152-year history of the paper."
• May 28: Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Rick Bragg resigns after the newspaper suspends him over a story that carried his byline but was reported largely by a free-lancer.
• June 5: Boyd and Raines, the paper's top two editors, step down, having been the focus of much of the criticism, especially for allowing Blair to cover the Washington-area sniper case when the Times' metropolitan editor had raised strong concerns about the reporter's trustworthiness.
Source: Associated Press
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NEW YORK (CNN) -- Jayson Blair, the former New York Times reporter at the center of a plagiarism scandal that prompted the resignation of the newspaper's two top editors, told WCBS-TV Thursday that he "never meant to hurt anyone."
"I'm truly sorry for my actions and what they've done," he said. "I felt like I was in a cycle of self-destruction that I never intended, and I never intended for it to hurt anyone else."
Executive Editor Howell Raines, 60, and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, 52, resigned Thursday after they had been under fire by staff since Blair, 27, was forced to leave the paper five weeks ago after being accused of plagiarizing and fabricating stories over a period of years. (Full story)
Later, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg quit after the newspaper published an editor's note saying he had written a story based almost entirely on the reporting of a free-lancer who received no credit for his work.
"I am sorry to hear that more people have fallen in this sequence of events that I had unleashed," Blair said in an e-mail to CNN. "I wish the rolling heads had stopped with mine."
He told WCBS-TV he felt that media coverage of the scandal was focusing too much on the racial aspects.
"It's a complicated, human tragedy, and that's the part that's been lost in all of this talk about race and all of the talk about the Times and racial preferences, is the human tragedy that I hope people can learn from," Blair said.
Blair, who is African-American, was hired at the Times under a program designed, in part, to bring more racial diversity to the newspaper, leading critics to question whether editors had overlooked his faulty work to protect a black reporter on a fast track to success. Boyd, who also is black, denied that charge but Raines admitted in a staff meeting it was possible Blair's race had a minor influence on how he was treated.
When asked to explain the "human tragedy" he referred to, after a long pause, Blair said: "It's very complicated."
"It has to do with my own human demons, my own weaknesses, and it ranges from, you know, my struggles with substance abuse to my own struggles with mental illness, to the fact that since I was in college or high school, I deferred my own desires and my own wants for ... what others wanted and somehow, when you add race and when you add other elements to that, I lost my compass."
Blair resigned May 1 after a Texas newspaper questioned whether he had plagiarized its story about the family of a soldier missing in Iraq.
A subsequent investigation by the newspaper uncovered several other instances in which Blair produced stories based on faked on-scene reporting, including the D.C. sniper case and a story on the family of Iraq War POW Jessica Lynch.
He said he regretted an interview with the New York Observer about three weeks after his resignation, in which he said he "fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism" with his reporting.
"Some of my comments in my interview with the New York Observer I felt were cruel, I felt were hurtful," Blair told WCBS-TV. "My emotions are still in turmoil and I should have waited to have some time to reflect before I talked."
He countered criticism that his quick rise at the Times was the result of favoritism from Raines and Boyd.
"Neither of them helped me any more than they helped any other reporter, and neither of them harmed me," he said. "Some people have used my mistakes, my deception as political tools to attack other people and that makes me sad as well."
He also shrugged off outrage about his proposal to write a book about the scandal -- tentatively titled "Burning Down My Master's House" -- from critics who say he's an opportunist.
"Certainly some people may think that, but that's not something I can control," he said.
Blair said he "definitely" plans to write about his experience, and has considered volunteer work with people suffering from mental illnesses and battling substance abuse.
"I only really want to do something or some things that help people get some good things out of my situation," he said.
