May 14, 2003	Wednesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 11, 1424

LOS ANGELES: A New York Times reporter has fabricated and plagiarized dozens of stories that have appeared in the paper, according to a report published on its own front page on Monday. 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.

On Monday 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.

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.

“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 the 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.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.