RACIAL JUSTICE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Last year, a Baltimore city jury acquitted 26-year-old Dontee Stokes on charges that he shot and wounded Father Maurice Blackwell, in spite of the fact that Stokes confessed to the shooting and never recanted. What got him off? He accused Father Blackwell of sexually molesting him when he a teenager, thus earning for himself a certain amount of sympathy. Stokes defense was essentially that he shot Father Blackwell to avenge his mistreatment and to serve the justice that the system never gave him. Since this was taking place in the wake of the Catholic Church's massive sex abuse scandals, Stokes' story had a certain ring of truth about it. As the case wore on, Baltimore opinion split over the question of Stokes' guilt, Blackwell's guilt, and whether Stokes was seeking justice or merely shooting in rage. Press coverage whipped up racial tensions throughout the city, and when Stokes won acquittal on the most serious charges against him, many hailed it as a victory for the city's black population. Ironically, racial activists could have claimed such a victory either way--both the shooter and his victim are black. Stokes' trial and acquittal symbolized, to many, the authorities' collective failure to aid blacks in trouble.

The New York Times covered the Stokes trial thoroughly. Their man on the job: Jayson Blair.

Reason's Hit and Run noted Blair's racially interesting coverage last fall. The rest of the country will probably take more notice of it now, in the wake of Blair's flame-out at the Times amid charges ranging from fabrication to plagiarism.

Developing...

UPDATE: Blair filed two stories regarding the Stokes acquittal, which ran on Dec 17 and 18, 2002. Both are filed from Baltimore, yet according to Editor & Publisher, from the period of October 2002 to April 2003, Blair never filed a single travel expense report. So it's likely that he wasn't even in Baltimore to file the stories. The byline is one of his many lies.

UPDATE: Unfortunately for me, I may have stumbled into one of the few stories where Blair's record is somewhat clean. The Times's chronology of his rise and fall indicates that he was sent to Maryland during the sniper spree, which was October of last year. He was assigned to the Times' Mid-Atlantic bureau, where their timeline indicates that he remained until the editors called him back to New York to augment the paper's war-depleted staff. So it seems he was probably in Baltimore during the Stokes trial, last December. I'm still looking into things and comparing his coverage with the Post and the Sun, but so far no smoking guns. He was never on the crest of the story, and was in fact a few days behind the other papers, but in this case he doesn't seem to have flagrantly committed any of the sins that got him fired.

On an interesting note, in his Dec 18th dispatch Blair goes out of his way to cast Baltimore's division over the Stokes acquittal as mostly racial. While there certainly were racial overtones, the city's division had as much to do with law and order as it did with race, and as much to do with geography as well. Those who saw Stokes as a justified avenger tended to be from the city's extensive lefty enclaves as well as it inner city; those who saw him as an unjustified shooter tended to be either the city's few conservatives or residents of the surrounding counties who face Charm City's crime problem on their daily commute to work in Baltimore. But many of those who expressed outrage at Stokes' acquittal were also from the inner city, and black, their reasoning being that acquitting Stokes sent the message to the city's criminal elements that it's open season on authority figures and anyone you have a problem with. The November 2002 mass murder of a black family known for trying to stop drug dealers in their neighborhood undoubtedly informed this line of thinking.

In the Stokes case, Blair injected race into his reporting by simply inserting racial descriptions of his interview subjects. That's a policy the Times doesn't extend to its crime coverage, where describing a perpetrator can help stop them more quickly.