Bad vs. Evil

In a long-overdue exit interview, Danny Jokrent explains that Jayson's Blair's plagiarism was a larger embarassment for the New York Times than its vouching for Administration lies about Iraqi WMD. Why? Because Blair was eeeeeevil:

In Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction? you wrote: "To anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of WMD seemed unmistakable. Except, of course, it appears to have been mistaken." Do you think that the Times' prewar reporting on WMD could prove to be a longer-term embarrassment to the paper than the Jayson Blair scandal?

"I don't know if I could speak to comparative sins. It certainly was a very serious case of bad journalism. It was not, to the best of my ability to determine, a case of 'I know we're lying as I write this,' which Jayson Blair was. Here was a guy consciously plagiarising. Here was a guy who meant to break the rules. The Times did a lousy job on WMD, but I can't imagine there was anybody in the office saying: 'Let's make up some things.'

But an argument can be made that the paper's WMD reporting helped lead the country into war.

"I'm not saying it's not a significant issue. I'm saying that the WMD reporting was not consciously evil. It was bad journalism, even very bad journalism."

Okrent also can't imagine there was anybody in the Oval Office saying: "Let's make up some things." So it didn't happen.