Trouble just seems to follow Jayson Blair around. The disgraced New York Times reporter, sacked for making up stories last year, is at the center of a new scandal as his tell-all memoir is about to hit bookshops.
Advance copies of the book have been leaked to newspapers, including The New York Times itself, prompting the publishers to warn of a campaign to rubbish the tome before it comes out.
In seeking to explain away the worst scandal ever to hit the US' most venerable broadsheet, Blair describes a "cut-throat culture that leaves no rivals standing" and admits he had a huge drug problem. Blair even admits drugs, especially cocaine, helped him to write. "Some of my best stories were inspired by drug-fueled writing," Blair writes.
Blair was exposed as a fraud last year after complaints from staff and readers that some of his stories appeared to be copied from other newspapers. A huge internal investigation uncovered serial fraud. Blair made up stories and sources, invented interview subjects and often wrote stories claiming to be from far-flung parts of the US when he had not left his Brooklyn flat.
In Burning Down My Master's House, Blair gives a no-holds-barred account of his rise and fall. The 27-year-old faked his first story after Sept. 11, 2001, when he embellished an interview with a victim called Andrew Rosstein. "I improvised by creating a last name for him," Blair wrote. "I had lifted quotes from other papers before, but never made something up. I do not know where it came from or how I got the name or what I was feeling at the moment -- other than a desperate desire to get into the newspaper."
Blair makes no secret about where that led. "I lied and I lied, and then I lied some more. I lied about where I had been, I lied about where I had found information, I lied about how I wrote the story," he writes.
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