Jayson Blair on 43rd Street: An Eyewitness Report!
This arrived last night from a Times source:
i was in the newsroom, at the metro desk, the afternoon jayson was being interviewed in front of the building, which was a sunday. what happened was that a couple of reporters saw him downstairs while they were on their way into the building. word got out that he was downstairs doing an interview, and then one reporter opened a window facing 43rd street and shouted something at him. i forget exactly what she said, but it wasn't a friendly hello, it was more along the lines of sarcasm or a taunt. (i believe it was, "hey jayson, look at you, you're really blowing up," or something like that.) i only know because i was there a few minutes later when she was laughing about it with a few colleagues by the metro desk.
So it would seem Blair's tale in Rush and Molloy was in fact not a wholesale fabrication but merely a unduly favorable interpretation of actual events. Which, for him, is a huge step.
