“[T]he move to hold top managers personally liable for any misrepresentations made to investors — which the new corporate oversight legislation also does — is a watershed worth celebrating…C.E.O’s will no longer be able to feign ignorance about the details of the companies’ accounting, as Jeffrey Skilling haughtily did early this year at a Congressional hearing on Enron’s implosion.”

—The New York Times, editorial, “Downsizing the Imperial C.E.O.,” August 9, 2002

“But Mr. Sulzberger emphasized that as The New York Times continues to examine how its employees and readers were betrayed, there will be no newsroom search for scapegoats. ‘The person who did this is Jayson Blair,’ he said. ‘Let’s not begin to demonize our executives — either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher.'”

—The New York Times, news article, “Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception,” May 11, 2003

Far be it from us to suggest how the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., ought to run his business, even if his editorial columns have spent much of the past year telling others how to run theirs. Mr. Sulzberger has been nothing but gracious to our own enterprise. But for the record, we have a slightly different view than the Times of the Blair affair.

The Times reckons the “journalistic fraud” it says Mr. Blair committed to be “a low-point in the 152-year history of the newspaper.” But that’s only by the standards of the current generation. Certainly Mr. Blair’s errors and deceptions had consequences, but, so far as we can tell so far, they weren’t life-or-death ones. The reputation of the Times may have suffered, but the course of world events was unaffected.

Typical of his transgressions was a dispatch about the parents of a rescued soldier that said their porch overlooked “tobacco fields and cattle pastures” and was on a hilltop. In fact, the paper clarified yesterday, the porch is in a valley and “overlooks no such thing.” If the Times wants to call this sort of stuff a low point in its history, it’s kidding itself and its readers. Far more egregious were the sins of the paper’s correspondent in Communist Russia in the 1930s, Walter Duranty, who, as S.J. Taylor, Robert Conquest, Andrew Stuttaford, and others have noted, assured readers that there was “no actual starvation” in the midst of Stalin’s forced collectivization campaign in the Ukraine. In fact, millions died of famine. The list of Pulitzer Prize winners on the Times Web site notes that “other writers in The Times and elsewhere have discredited” Duranty’s coverage.

Almost as egregious was the record of the Times’ man at Havana, Herbert Matthews, who, as the 1999 Times history “The Trust” put it, became “emotionally involved” with Fidel Castro, whose regime he claimed was “free, honest, and democratic.” Those suffering in Castro’s dungeons at the time knew otherwise, as have those who since then have perished trying to escape the prison of the Communist island.

The Times continued this tradition this weekend, running on Saturday a blatantly deceptive piece by the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations. “We do not seek to interfere or impose any type of government on the Iraqi people,” the Axis ambassador claimed, even as members of the Iranian Republican Guard are on Iraqi soil actively interfering with American and Iraqi attempts to rebuild the country. “Developing nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction does not enhance Iran’s security,” the ambassador claimed in the article, even as Iranian nuclear scientists are racing to build atomic weapons. Iran “has not invaded any neighboring country for close to two-and-a-half centuries,” the ambassador claimed, even with the Republican Guard in Iraq and Iranian-funded, Iranian-directed terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah carrying out their deadly operations at Lebanon, Turkey, and Egypt, and against Jews in Israel and Argentina.

These kinds of transgressions tower over those of the troubled Jayson Blair. We mention that not to excuse Mr. Blair’s actions, but to put them into perspective. It’s easy enough for the Times to apologize to those harmed by Mr. Blair’s reporting. At least they are still alive, which is more than one can say for the victims of Stalin, Castro, and the Iranian mullahs. It would be nice to think that this is something the Times might contemplate as it pursues its corporate introspection into how one poorly supervised reporter managed to put so many things past an idealistic and well-intentioned management. And think about again the next time it agitates for bringing the force of federal law down on other corporate managers who failed to identify fraud in their own institutions.