“Being black was not getting your ticket punched,” Jones said. “He was given a favored position because he was perceived as having potential.”

Jones also shrugged off the suggestion that Blair’s transgressions had been made possible by Raines’ “top-down” approach.

“News organizations are almost inherently hierarchical,” he said.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that Times writers and editors sharply criticized Raines’ leadership at a heated meeting Wednesday attended by more than 500 staffers.

Jones said that Raines’ style might have rubbed some in the industry the wrong way, leading to a less charitable attitude towards him when the Blair story broke.

“He didn’t have enough in the bank” for other journalists to forgive him right away, Jones said.

Callie Crossley, the Nieman Foundation’s Program Manager, placed the blame for this perception squarely on the shoulders of Raines and his high-level associates at the Times.

“If the editors had taken responsibility, the broader view would have been that anyone, whatever their race, could have done this,” she said, citing instead an “all Jayson, all the time” attitude in the media.

And Crossley said there was no doubt in her mind that Raines and his colleagues at the Times were more responsible for the Blair incident than they have admitted.

“You can cheat if people aren’t at their appointed post,” she said.

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.