News of the World and NY Times face more embarassment
8th June, 2003
by Sunny Hundal
It wouldn’t surprise many in the media industry to know that sometimes the biggest stories are about mistakes made by others. When a scandal hits one big paper, the competing vultures start circling in glee.
Almost no one hesitated to point fingers at the News of the World this week when the trial regarding Victoria Beckham’s kidnapping collapsed. It transpired that Mazher Mahmood, an investigations editor at the paper, paid a convicted criminal a sum of £10,000 for revealing a plot to kidnap the singer.
The trial collapsed because there was a possibility that Florim Gashi, the convicted criminal that Mr. Mahmood paid, himself persuaded the gang to focus on Victoria Beckham instead of some jewels and then help the NoW to catch them in the act. The journalist, dubbed as the “fake sheikh”, has made a name for himself over the years by enticing other people into sting operations, and has to protect his identity because of previous death threats.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of red faces at the NY Times as well. The scandal, which rocked the paper when it turned out a journalist had been plagiarising articles for a long time, refuses to go away. This time it has claimed the heads of the NY Times’ top two editors, and things don't seem to get better.
The problem was that Jayson Blair, the reporter who resigned when his unethical tactics were revealed, is black. Accusations flew that in the name of diversity, the paper not only unfairly pushed him up the ranks, but it also failed to act upon the many complaints that his peers made of him.
The claims made against the paper might be true, but it shows how tricky race relations can be in a very white media industry. Jayson Blair’s race shouldn’t even be an issue, specially since the media industry takes great pains with tokenistic efforts to give the impression it supports diversity.
Yet the fact that his immediate superiors, and the chief editors of such a journalistic institution were forced to resign, shows that racial politics is still rampant in the media. I would go as far as to speculate that if something similar happened in the UK, the media industry would try to sweep it under the carpet in order to keep paying the lip service to diversity.
I leave you with this quote by Bill O'Reilly, Mr. No Spin Zone: "We all know the terrible problems The New York Times is having because its editors imposed a politically correct atmosphere at the paper that allowed a minority reporter, Jayson Blair, special treatment ..."
It wouldn’t surprise many in the media industry to know that sometimes the biggest stories are about mistakes made by others. When a scandal hits one big paper, the competing vultures start circling in glee.Almost no one hesitated to point fingers at the News of the World this week when the trial regarding Victoria Beckham’s kidnapping collapsed. It transpired that Mazher Mahmood, an investigations editor at the paper, paid a convicted criminal a sum of £10,000 for revealing a plot to kidnap the singer.
The trial collapsed because there was a possibility that Florim Gashi, the convicted criminal that Mr. Mahmood paid, himself persuaded the gang to focus on Victoria Beckham instead of some jewels and then help the NoW to catch them in the act. The journalist, dubbed as the “fake sheikh”, has made a name for himself over the years by enticing other people into sting operations, and has to protect his identity because of previous death threats.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of red faces at the NY Times as well. The scandal, which rocked the paper when it turned out a journalist had been plagiarising articles for a long time, refuses to go away. This time it has claimed the heads of the NY Times’ top two editors, and things don't seem to get better.
The problem was that Jayson Blair, the reporter who resigned when his unethical tactics were revealed, is black. Accusations flew that in the name of diversity, the paper not only unfairly pushed him up the ranks, but it also failed to act upon the many complaints that his peers made of him.
The claims made against the paper might be true, but it shows how tricky race relations can be in a very white media industry. Jayson Blair’s race shouldn’t even be an issue, specially since the media industry takes great pains with tokenistic efforts to give the impression it supports diversity.
Yet the fact that his immediate superiors, and the chief editors of such a journalistic institution were forced to resign, shows that racial politics is still rampant in the media. I would go as far as to speculate that if something similar happened in the UK, the media industry would try to sweep it under the carpet in order to keep paying the lip service to diversity.
I leave you with this quote by Bill O'Reilly, Mr. No Spin Zone: "We all know the terrible problems The New York Times is having because its editors imposed a politically correct atmosphere at the paper that allowed a minority reporter, Jayson Blair, special treatment ..."
