Nice
I haven't joined in the extensive comment about the Jayson Blair debacle at the NY Times, but I thought this item from Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post was a nice vingette in the overall story. It really gives the measure of the man - Blair Doctored My Work, Writer Says:

Lisa Suhay, a contract writer for the New York Times, was stunned when she saw what Jayson Blair had done with her work.

It was the summer of 2000, and Blair had asked her to interview some people about the recently announced Firestone tire recall. Suhay discovered a neighborhood man named Michael Matha in his New Jersey driveway who said he had just gotten replacement tires from Firestone for his Ford Explorer. She e-mailed his comments to Blair.

The next day's story opened with Matha having been transported to "a Firestone tire and service center." In Blair's version, the man had not yet gotten his tires. "I've heard that they're putting people off because there's a shortage of replacement tires, but I'm not taking no for an answer," Matha was quoted as saying.
...
But to Suhay, Blair's story was "fiction." What she found "didn't fit the premise in Jayson's mind, which is that people were upset about getting a raw deal from Firestone. . . . There was no Sturm und Drang, so he created it."
...
"I was livid," Suhay said yesterday. "I was beyond livid." She said she complained to editors on the Times metro desk, and clerks on the business desk, but they brushed her off. Blair refused to run a correction, she said, and at one point threatened her.

"Jayson told me that if I was tired of working for the Times, he would make sure my name was taken off the assignment list," Suhay said. "He made it clear that he was in the office every day while I was just a voice on the phone. Who would editorial listen to if he told them not to use me because I was difficult to work with? I backed off."

What a guy! I don't think anything this punk is going to get is even half of enough.