It's been five years since a journalistic time bomb named Jayson Blair finally exploded at the New York Times, leading to an article published on the newspaper's website with the following sombre headline: "Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception."

"The widespread fabrication and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper," the article said.

"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."

Here's a May 7 Newseum article.

To review quickly and with excessive succinctness, Blair, a skilled ingratiator, got ensconced at the Times and was eventually made a national reporter -- despite problems with errors in reporting and various and sundry personal issues.

On the Washington sniper story, he was getting scoops from anonymous D.C. cops that veteran police reporters couldn't match. Way to go, Jayson! Except a prosecutor once held a news conference to denounce the central claim of one story.

However, onward and upward for Jayson. Executive ditor Howell Raines, who vowed to raise the "competitive metabolism" of the Times when he took the job in 2001, liked the cut of Blair's jib, calling him "hungry."

The end for Jayson began on April 28, 2003, when editors pressed him to explain how one of his stories had exactly the same quotes as a story written by a San Antonio News-Express reporter four days before his own.

Blair resigned on May 1.

The NYT assembled a team to review Blair's reporting and found not only a nightmarish morass of fabrication and plagiarism, but also evidence of some rather industrious and creative efforts to cover up this malfeasance.

However, Blair got put into a job he should have never had.

In fact, had the Times done better due diligence on the guy, he would have probably never been hired in the first place (he lied about finishing his degree. No one checked).

In January 2002, Jonathan Landman, then the paper's metropolitan editor, ripped Blair a new one in a memo about his error rate. He forwarded a copy of that memo to Gerald Boyd, then the paper's managing editor. In April of that year, Landman would write another memo saying: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now."

But no one did. Instead, Blair was moved up to the national reporting desk.

That's madness.

While there's not a lot of justice in this world, there is some. Raines and Boyd both lost their jobs over this fiasco.

The NYT convened a committee (the Siegal committee) to review the entire mess and suggest changes. Byron Calame, then the NYT's public editor, addressed the issue of whether the Blair debacle could be repeated in a June 18, 2006 column.

A few of my recommendations?

1. Start with competent senior managers. Raines and Boyd were unsuited to the jobs they had.

2. Don't fall in love with potential hires without thoroughly vetting them first. There were lots of warning signs about Blair -- if anyone senior had cared to look.*

* Thing is, Times publisher Arthur Sulzburger Jr. had fallen in love with Raines, and had ignored some pointed warnings about the effect his guy's management style was having on the newsroom. Some reportage indicated that the Sulzburger family pulled some strings at one point to ensure Raines won a Pulitzer. If you didn't, tradition held  that your path into senior newsroom management at the NYT was blocked.

3. Take performance issues seriously -- especially when someone starts saying an individual reporter has to be stopped "right now."

4. Don't let a culture of cronyism get established (Blair wasn't the only Raines favourite who got an easy ride until disaster fell). Raines didn't want to hear bad news.

5. Don't run your newsroom based solely on trust. Conduct random audits of reporters' work. If a serious problem is uncovered, look deeper. If someone is delivering the seemingly impossible, ask how. At an Alberta newspaper that shall remain unnamed, one reporter was delivering some amazing stuff by telephone on the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster -- despite not being able to speak a word of Russian or Ukrainian. This person was later linked to other serious journalistic misconduct.

In journalism, the biggest rewards go  to those who deliver the spectacular, not necessarily those who do a steady, solid job of professional journalism on a day-in, day-out basis.

To get a leg up on the immense amount of competition, some people are always going to be tempted to cheat. In fact, many of those caught plagiarizing and fabricating have been considered strong performers, if not stars (however, one should then draw the conclusion that anyone who is a star got that designation through cheating).

Since you're dealing with that reality of human nature, it's important to make one's checks-and-balances system as thorough as practically possible.

This isn't limited to journalists. Cops have been known to bend the truth to get convictions, and researchers to torque the data on their studies, to name two groups.

The question I've always had about journalistic fabricators, however, is this: If you want to invent stuff, why not just become a fiction writer and be done with it?

The most infamous case before Jayson Blair was that of Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for her story about an eight-year-old heroin addict. She later admitted to fabricating the story, forcing the storied paper to return the award. Some years later, she was working as a six-dollar-an-hour clerk in a Chicago department store -- and professed a desire to return to journalism (?!?!).

Write the Great American Novel, lady.

Some other stuff

The definitive book is Hard News: The scandals at the New York Times and their meaning for American media, by Seth Mnookin.

In a May 13, 2003 column, Slate's Jack Shafer sticks up for Raines:

The obvious parallels between the Jayson Blair caper and the spy escapades of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen should sober the gotcha patrol currently buzz-bombing Howell Raines. Accomplished liars will beat polygraphs, mislead interrogators, and hoodwink the most sophisticated security regime.So hate Raines as much as you want, and denounce the Times to your heart's content, and demand as much genuflecting from the paper's editors as you desire. Just remember the last time you were conned.

An interview of Howell Raines by PBS's Charlie Rose on YouTube. The interview was conducted weeks after Raines' firing in June 2003.

Here's some excerpts from the Siegal committee report, as published by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

In May 2004, Raines had an article published in the Atlantic: "My Times."

Shafer was less kind to Raines in his March 24, 2004 column "The autobiography of Howell Raines," which reviewed that Atlantic article:

There's enough self-love in Raines' autobiography to earn it a place in the autoerotica section. By the time Raines stops romancing himself in the public mirror, conjures the last mirage of the glory that could have been, and settles his final grudge, you can only conclude that Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. did readers and Times staffers a service by terminating this vain and cockeyed beast.

On Nov. 11, 2004, Shafer, in "The See-Through Times", wrote:

After I filed yesterday's column about Seth Mnookin's Times book, I found myself wishing that I'd written that the horrific Howell Raines train wreck turned out to be good for the paper. It's not just because that his replacement, Executive Editor Bill Keller, is a nicer guy who feeds his staff snacks out of the palm of his hand every day at 3 p.m. It's because he's taken down a bit of the fourth wall to give readers a better look at how the paper is made.

On May 5, 2008, Raines told Editor and Publisher the following:

"I am proud of the fact that it set the standard for in-house inquiries," he recalled by telephone Monday, referring to the in-depth investigation the paper launched on Blair. "I feel proud of the fact that we had as close to a full investigation as any journalistic entity has done in my experience."

Blair, then 27, resigned from the paper on May 1, 2003. On May 11, the Times ran a lengthy, four-page explanation of his misdeeds and a chronology of its findings. In June 2003, Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd were forced to resign. Boyd died in 2006.

"I was proud of the fact that we never saw the [May 11] story until it ran in the paper," Raines recalled. "It added to the credibility of the report that none of the editors involved in handling Jayson were involved in editing the story."

In the Canadian Journal of Communications, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2006), Ivor Shapiro reviews some books on this subject, including Glass's The Fabulist and Blair's Burning Down My Master's House:

The Fabulist drips with self-justification and self-pity: “I can’t have any more people hate me . . . I’m sorry. I am truly sorry, I’m sorry . . .,” its protagonist tells a telephone operator at one point before crying himself to sleep (p. 124). But the novel does clearly, and certainly intentionally, suggest explanations for Glass’ actions.

These include personal factors that we might place under the heading of psychological disability: “Glass” is presented as a “fucked-up kid” who is so “compulsively imaginative” that he’s surprised to discover that notes for his fabricated stories don’t exist. He longs to be admired and loved; he cheats to avoid rejection. But the author also points a stern finger of blame at workplace pressures: in the fictional “Glass’ ” first flirtation with fabrication, the celebrated but professionally untrained star pitches a story to his colleagues, fails to find reportable facts that live up to what was promised, then faces pressure from editors to provide more details — and, after that, more stories like it. He finds himself increasingly encouraged to write “snarky, glib, superior” copy and learns that what a journalist is looking for is “a good story; accuracy’s only half of it” (pp. 181-185). None of this kind of pressure will be foreign to true-life feature writers in positions comparable to Glass’.

The real Glass gave an interview to CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes while promoting the book. In it, he described a decisive moment of temptation that will resonate for journalists everywhere: “I remember thinking, if I just had the exact quote that I wanted, it would be perfect . . . .” It’s what he did next that sets him apart:

[A]nd then I wrote something on my computer and I let it stand. And then it ran in the magazine and I said to myself what I said every time, ‘You must stop . . . .’ But I didn’t . . . . I loved the electricity, I loved going to story conference meetings and telling people what my story was going to be and seeing them in front of me, excited. I wanted every story to be a home run.

Unlike Glass’ “novel,” Blair’s Burning Down My Master’s House declares itself pure memoir. That is, factual. Of course, no one would take this author’s idea of truth for granted, and several relatively benign lies have been identified in it. Stylistically and in overall content, the book is far from a page-turner even for media junkies: the New Yorker’s reviewer, Nicholas Lemann, described it as “a curio, an artifact, an unprocessed download from Blair’s brain — vivid, wired, serviceably written and paced, and, in a way, more interesting for its artlessness.” But, like Glass’, Blair’s account presents an interesting combination of explanations for journalistic sins.

These explanations are not always explicit, coherent, or clear, but they start (once again) with personal factors: childhood sexual abuse, manic depression, cocaine addiction, excessive drinking, even a touch of post-traumatic stress disorder. Blair, who is Black, also imputes racism to certain colleagues and managers. But the implied explanations include, once again, mostly plausible references to the pressures attached to working in a high-profile journalistic workplace — a constant pressure to produce, “a deep desire to get into the paper,” and, especially, to make the front page, the ultimate, though fleeting, measure of a reporter’s worth.

Every journalist wants to tell a fantastic story, to find something out that no one else did. I'd like to believe that only a very tiny number will lie -- to sources, colleagues, editors, the public and themselves -- to achieve that goal.

Here's hoping those cheaters get caught.