There has been some comparison of the NY Times' Jayson Blair scandal to the infamous Janet Cooke story. Cooke, a reporter for the Washington Post, concocted a story about an eight-year-old junkie in 1981. The initial story caused a sensation, with Cooke winning a Pulitzer Prize. However, eventually it was discovered that she had made the boy up and she was fired and had the prize rescinded.
The interesting thing to me is that if the story had been written in the mid-late 1980s, there would have been no controversy at all about it. Indeed, it is not hard to imagine by then that the story about an eight-year-old junkie would have been passed on by editors as the equivalent of dog bites man.
