Jayson Blair

When we watched the video about Jayson Blair, I couldn’t believe some of what I was hearing. To me what he did was horrible. “I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism,” said Blair. This was a quote I found that he said. Just by this quotation, it looked as if this was a game to him. He did not seem to care about others, or who he might hurt in the process.

After watching Shattered Glass, I compared it to this and yes they are similar; however, they are also different in a lot of ways. A similarity that I saw was that they both did not follow journalism ethics. They lied to their editors and coworkers, and fabricated stories. Blair however sank to a new low in his made up stories. He talked about fallen and missing soldiers. There was a lot of sensitive material that he was assigned to that he should not have messed with.

In my personal opinion, Blair still seems to be lying. “Having said that, it sounds as if in many ways you are a pathological liar,” Katie Couric said during their interview. I do not believe that Blaire has told the entire truth and I think that he is using his situation to exploit himself. I fully agree that he is getting too much attention and now he is trying to sell a book. The title of his book, Burning Down my Master’s House, was an insult to many I believe too. The title suggest he is comparing himself to slavery, however I think that is far from the issue.

I do believe that Blair had many personal problems. Despite the issues in his private life, he should not have used it as an excuse to compromise his professional work. If he is or was mentally sick he could have taken a number of steps to prevent this from every happening.

Education Takes a Cut

The ongoing issue with education is now taking a turn to cut school days out of the school year for the Los Angeles School District. An agreement between school district officials and employee unions was already agreed upon; now it just needs to be voted on to be finalized. I think that there are some pros and definitely some cons to this proposal. First this will save jobs, keep class sizes low, and save the district a ton of money. However, it also can hurt instruction. In my opinion I think that if this is the only way and last resort to this problem, then they should do it. But, I think that this can cause a harmful effect in the instruction for the children. The students are going to be losing seven valuable days of learning. Even though class sizes won’t be as much, they will still be big and now the teacher has to figure out someway to cram more and more information into the students. To me education has also been on the back burner. I think that more funds should be allocated toward education. There are things that can be cut back from before they start cutting back on education. The foundation for how our society works and functions is based on a child’s education. I know California, along with the rest of the country is in a financial crisis, but I think that there is careless and reckless spending in other areas that need to be assessed before teachers and students are the ones suffering. If cutting school days from our schools doesn’t work, then what’s next?