Jayson Blair

ONCE AGAIN it's open season on affirmative action. The incident that has sparked the latest round of rhetoric is the actions of Jayson Blair, a 27-year-old black journalist who was caught in the act of committing journalistic fraud at The New York Times. As a result of Mr. Blair's ethical breach, the paper's two top editors, Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, the first African-American to serve as managing editor for what is considered the world's most influential newspaper, stepped down from their posts.

A review of articles written by disgraced reporter Jayson Blair for a student-staffed news agency run by the University of Maryland has found repeated errors and several sources who dispute remarks attributed to them. But it did not uncover any of the rampant plagiarism or fabrication found in at least three dozen stories he later wrote for The New York Times. The university's Philip Merrill College of Journalism commissioned the study of Blair's work in the wake of the scandal at the Times that cost him his job last spring and, ultimately, cost the newspaper's two top editors their jobs as well.

The Sun's Olympic correspondents, Rick Maese and Kevin Van Valkenburg, are blogging back and forth to each other at baltimoresun.com/olympicsblog. Some excerpts: So it turns out you can't see The Great Wall from space. Who started that urban legend? Jayson Blair? It turns out you can't even see The Great Wall from 500 feet away if the smog is bad enough, but when you do see it, man, is it impressive. Going to Mutianyu today was the best $50 of company money I've ever spent. Did you know that the wall is nearly 4,000 miles long?

Hash, by Torgny Lindgren, (translated by Tom Geddes). Overlook Press. 236 pages. $23.95. If you were alone in some hut on the frozen tundra of northern Sweden, with only the aurora borealis for illumination and a flask of aquavit for comfort, you might write a novel something like Hash, which refers not to the hallucinogen but to an awful offal dish. Sometimes made from squirrels, spiced with nutmeg to mask its offensive smell, it can be partaken hot, or frozen, then sliced up in slabs.

COLLEGE PARK - In the main entry hall of the University of Maryland building that is home to the Merrill College of Journalism, flat high-resolution television screens offer, by turn, CNN, C-SPAN and the University of Maryland's internal network. A fourth screen offers enlarged Web sites, one of which carries headlines of stories from newspapers across the country about the myriad professional sins of former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. Until his disgrace earlier this month for plagiarizing and fabricating articles, the 27-year-old Blair was among the Maryland journalism school's newest stars.

Newsweek officially retracted yesterday a report that said U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had desecrated the Quran, which sparked rioting in Afghanistan and Pakistan that claimed at least 15 lives and drew denunciations from the Bush administration. After a weekend of half-measures in which the magazine apologized for the report without retracting it, Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker said in a brief statement late yesterday, "Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Quran abuse at Guantanamo Bay."

When "Deep Throat" first cloaked himself in secrecy, W. Mark Felt was the nation's No. 2 crime fighter, the presidency was headed into some of its darkest days ever and the news media were on the verge of what would be their brightest. Today, more than 30 years later, Felt is a 91-year-old stroke victim who uses a walker. The presidency has, despite some bumps, rebounded. And the news media are limping through a mire of scandal, public distrust and self-doubt. Felt's disclosure that he was the nation's most famous anonymous source comes at a time - ironically or not - when the press, and newspapers in particular, is re-examining not just that practice, but its very soul.

Ten days after The New York Times published a voluminous account that sought to clarify reporter Judith Miller's role in the CIA-leak case, the newspaper, widely considered the country's finest, finds itself ever more deeply embroiled in a controversy over the veteran staffer's actions. The fiasco comes just as the Times seemed to have emerged from the furor over Jayson Blair, whose serial fabrications prompted the firings in 2003 of its two top editors and led to searing criticism of the publication.

IN LESS THAN a year, two major national newspapers have devoted pages of their main news sections to special reports-not on the war on terrorism or the war in Iraq or the presidential race - but on their own egregious mistakes. In May, it was The New York Times, one of the country's most respected newspapers, explaining how reporter Jayson Blair had deceived readers. This month, it was USA Today, the nation's most widely circulated newspaper, explaining how foreign correspondent Jack Kelley invented stories from locales around the globe.

Mitch Albom, one of Detroit's most prominent figures, is a one-man multimedia entity as a nationally known sports columnist, radio and TV personality, best-selling author and playwright. He added another role last week, one no journalist wants. Albom is making news rather than reporting it, under suspension from the Detroit Free Press until the paper completes an investigation of a fabrication in a column by Albom that ran last Sunday. Reaction in the journalism community, from columnist peers to college instructors, ranged from harsh to empathetic.