A New York Times reporter has fabricated and plagiarised dozens of stories that have appeared in the paper, according to a report published on its own front page yesterday. The "frequent acts of journalistic fraud" committed by Jayson Blair "represent a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper", it said.
Blair, 27, left the paper last week after he was found to have lifted material about a dead soldier's family from the San Antonio News Express and pretended to have been at the scene when he was not.
Since then, a team of the paper's reporters has been retracing every one of the 673 stories that Blair had filed during his four years on the Times.
Yesterday the paper devoted four broadsheet pages to their latest findings. Blair had often pretended to be in places where he was not and invented information from unnamed sources on major stories, from the Washington sniper case to the Iraq war.
"It's a huge black eye," said Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the chairman of the New York Times Company. "It's an abrogation of trust between the newspaper and its readers."
Blair, who is from Virginia and started on the paper as a graduate trainee, had already been warned about his reporting. Colleagues became suspicious because he seemed to cover so much ground and one of his editors said more than a year ago that he did not believe he should be writing for the Times.
It transpired that Blair had often filed from New York while pretending to be at the scenes of big stories.
"His tools of deceit were a cell phone 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," said yesterday's report. Blair apparently looked at photos on the paper's database to glean colour for stories that he would then write as if he had been at the scene when, on some occasions, he was still in the office.
His report supposedly from the home of the rescued soldier Jessica Lynch describes "tobacco fields and cattle pastures" that do not exist, according to the family.
Blair has declined to assist the Times in its investigation. The paper is now examining how he was able to operate for so long when so many editors expressed misgivings.
The seven-person team assembled to retrace his stories has asked members of the public mentioned in them to come forward. "For now, the atmosphere of a disliked relative's protracted wake pervades the newsroom," the Times said.