Times metro editor Jonathan Landman, who tried to warn fellow editors at the paper about Blair's increasingly erratic behavior, says the truth lies somewhere in the middle. "There are two conventional wisdoms out there [about the Blair scandal]," he says, but "neither one of them is right. It's not a morality play about race and affirmative action, as some would like to suggest, and it's not a story that has nothing to do with race. Race was one factor among many in a subtle interplay."

...Former New York Daily News columnist Jim Sleeper charged that Blair was hired and kept on in order to "to assuage white managers' moralistic enthusiasm and guilt."

Jim Dwyer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Times, dismisses charges that Blair was the product of newsroom affirmative action gone awry as "a crock of sh*t." He insists, "You can go crazy trying to explain everything through the prism of race."

"Jayson had talent. He had drive. Some people found him charming. That ought to carry you somewhere in this world," says Dwyer, who is white and who had no direct working relationship with Blair. "It carried him further than his skin color did, in my opinion."

Dwyer notes the idea of redemption, as attempted for years with Blair, is hardly unique within the newsroom business. "I've worked at six newspapers and seen alcoholic shipwrecks and drug shipwrecks, and people who've fallen apart through nervous breakdowns, and they're all brought back and given a second chance. I've seen it happen to people of every race," says Dwyer.

He also claims critics, including Cohen at the Post, are playing loose with the facts when they express astonishment that the Times did nothing after metro editor Landman sent his now famous two-sentence e-mail to his colleagues in the spring of 2002: ""We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now." Says Dwyer: "Anybody who says nothing was done is reading right over the inconvenient fact that Jayson Blair was shut down [in the spring of 2002] and brought within an inch of being fired and put on a probation that he worked himself out of. Then events accelerated [when he was moved to the national desk], and unfortunately he did what he did when given a bigger chance."

Others insist a newsroom culture of rewarding productivity explains Blair's pampering at the Times. "He was clearly a schemer who was rewarded for being prolific, being able to turn a phrase, having no life outside of the Times newsroom, and catering to the whims of his superiors," says Newkirk, author of "Within the Veil." "What editor is not going to fall for that, no matter what the person's race?"
From article by Eric Boehlert in Salon.com