Jayson Blair and Richard H. Brodhead--Those Who Lie in the NEW YORK TIMES

This week while reading Bruce DeSilva’s ROGUE ISLAND (2010), p. 90, I saw this passage:

"On the integrity of journalists: Unless you’re a member of the tribe, you have no idea how hard journalists take mistakes. Sure, the business occasionally attracts a fraud like Jayson Blair, the reporter who got fired for making stuff up at The New York Times. But the lies they tell hurt the rest of us, and so does every honest mistake that makes readers doubt what we print."

The Wikipedia heading on Blair says this: “Jayson Thomas Blair is an American journalist formerly with The New York Times. He resigned from the newspaper in May 2003 in the wake of the discovery of plagiarism and fabrication in his stories.”

Jayson Blair lied in the New York TIMES and got fired for it.

Richard H. Brodhead lied in the New York TIMES when he reviewed the 2^nd volume of my biography of Melville in June 2002. Trashing my credibility, he declared that only I in my “black hole” (had he seen my study?) had ever heard of a book I said Melville finished in 1860, POEMS. Of course, every scholar had known about the lost book since 1922, the year after Weaver’s biography was published. Documents about it are in all the standard places such as THE MELVILLE LOG. But Brodhead, a genteel New Critic, not a scholar, was Dean of Yale College, and could get away with lying about me in the New York TIMES, and a few months later Andrew Delbanco (a professor at Columbia) took the lying even further in the NEW REPUBLIC, saying because I invented lost books I could not be trusted anywhere in either volume. Then in 2005 Delbanco published a derivative biography ("Look, Ma, No Research") in which he casually mentioned the existence of the books he had said I invented. Neither Brodhead nor Delbanco has ever acknowledged their trashing my reputation and neither seems to have suffered for their sins.

Jayson Blair lied in the New York TIMES and got fired.

Richard H. Brodhead lied in the New York TIMES and got made President of Duke University. He will be remembered as the contemptible figure in KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT (2007) and their new THE CAMPUS RAPE FRENZY. But will he ever apologize for lying about me?