I'm way, way late to the party in bringing up Jayson Blair, the disgraced New York Times reporter who decided that the best way to avoid a work-related trip to West Virginia is to assume that everyone's house there overlooks tobacco fields. If you've been living on a desert island for the past month, or simply don't share the average journalist's narcissistic belief that everyone in the world is as interested in media gossip as the average journalist, here's an overview.
The part of this whole sorry mess that rings the most true to me as an, ahem, journalist isn't the sense of outrage at the desecration of my noble craft (picture a rendering plant on an August afternoon), or the sad realization that most people affected by Mssr. Blair's fabrications simply assumed that's the way the media goes about its business (a reasonable assumption, incidentally). No, what really bugs me is the moose.
Other writers have explained the moose in detail, but the upshot is this: At some point, Times management handed out little Beanie Baby-style meese to employees, as a reminder that they should feel free to talk about important, but often unspoken, issues. Apparently, some people actually bring them to meetings. Important meetings.
Beyond some college freelancing, I've never worked at the Times (a fact that should be glaringly obvious to anyone who's read anything I've ever done). But I've seen similar animal-related travesties at several of my jobs. At one, the editors decided to counter the complaint that there was too much "bad news" in the paper by running a graphic of a smiling cartoon dog holding a paper bearing the words "GOOD NEWS!" with any story that didn't involve blunt force trauma. At another, they handed out not meese, but little plastic fish, supposedly to symbolize the sense of fun that a fishmonger might have on the job. Some middle-management guru made a small fortune extrapolating this concept of forced workplace frivolity into a very thin book featuring very large type, ignoring the fact that, as Dilbert once pointed out, the "title characters get tossed around and eaten."
But I digress. We all got fun plastic fish. We had a naming contest, which resulted in our workplace mascot being given the name "James Pond." A good time was had by all.
Weeks later, the layoffs began.
Meanwhile, you can hear from the man himself, Mssr. Jayson Blair, minus his company-appointed moose. Oh, those wacky Inter web pranksters!