The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Future Speakers to Include Bernie Madoff, Osama bin Laden and Roman Polanski
Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Va., holds its 48th Journalism Ethics Institute next week. The Rockbridge Weekly describes the event:
The W&L Journalism Ethics Institutes, held twice each year, bring to campus top media professional and academics for two days of seminars with students from the University’s capstone journalism ethics class. The sessions deal with case studies of ethical dilemmas that the practicing journalists present.
So which top media professional is on tap for next week? If you’re drinking anything, swallow now, lest you soak your keyboard.
Jayson Blair!
Seriously:
“Inviting Jayson Blair to keynote this institute was definitely a departure for us,” said Edward Wasserman, the Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics at W&L. “In the past, we’ve brought heroes to Lexington, people of great accomplishment and stature, such as Hodding Carter, Helen Thomas and Lowell Bergman, and people who stood up to pressure in the name of principled journalism, such as Matt Cooper and my W&L faculty colleague Toni Locy, both of whom faced jail time because they refused to give up the names of sources they had promised to protect.
“Jayson Blair, on the other hand, was at the center of one of the signature journalism scandals of this still-new century, and there’s no way to imagine that his role in it was heroic,” Wasserman continued. “When I approached him with the invitation, he said that although he has not spoken publicly about the affair that led to his dismissal from the New York Times, this might be the right time and right occasion. My expectation is that he’ll talk not just about his own susceptibilities, but about the pressures and temptations that might induce ambitious and talented young journalists elsewhere in the business to do the wrong thing.”
In case you’ve forgotten, Blair lost his job when his editors discovered that he had been making stuff up. If the W&L faculty think this involved any sort of “ethical dilemma,” no news organization should ever hire one of their students.
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