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I am going to write in defense of Jayson Blair. But not for the reason I thought I would.

When I first heard about the Blair story, my very petty and adolescent initial reaction was probably the same one felt by Times haters on all sides of the political spectrum: unbridled glee and drawn-out fits of croaking, superior laughter. It couldn't have happened to nicer people, I hissed, in the direction of anyone who would listen. It was such an occasion that I even allowed myself to indulge in a long, speculative reverie about the initial reaction to the news on the part of Times editor Howell Raines. Eventually I settled on mute, still silence, followed by an Elmer Fudd-esque involuntary unfurling of a foot-long editorial tongue, landing with a thud on his cornflower tie.

After that, I moved on to a slightly less childish hipster-media-critic stance, which I figured would be the one I'd stick with. The glib/wiseass position I planned to take here was that "Jayson Blair is a genius," a person whose amazing exploits had revealed modern news journalism for the comically primitive endeavor it is.

In so seamlessly faking so many of those sappy, rote stories with those somber titles-"A Couple Separated by War While United in Their Fears" is my favorite-Blair proved that most news journalism requires not thought or insight, but only the loosest compliance with a few very basic rules of cliche and tone.

The reason no one noticed the fakes wasn't that Blair was a talented fraud. It was that in the context of today's newspapers, it's virtually impossible to spot even an obvious phony, because all newspaper writing is phony.

When there are armies of cynical, half-bright careerists cranking out fake fallen-hero or sympathy-for-the-victim stories by the metric ton-when a hundred journalists a day need multiple takes to get their tearful salutes to the troops right-how can a lone "A Couple Separated by War While United in Their Fears" possibly stand out?

It can't, I thought, and God bless Jayson Blair for making America face that fact.

But then that position didn't sit right with me, either. Because after listening to the Jayson Blair public outcry for a week, I found myself growing increasingly upset. Not with the Limbaugh types who hinted bluntly that this is what happens when black people are given positions of responsibility. And not even at the Times itself, which shamelessly saw fit to publish a letter to the editor from a reader congratulating the paper for its thorough self-investigation.

No, I was mad at those readers out there who fell hook, line and sinker for this media frenzy, doing as they always do, giving a scandal the disproportionate importance all scandals have.

The irony of the Blair story is that it is a story about unethical journalism that itself showed our media at its most dishonest. And no one noticed it.

The whole business of hyper-publicizing scandals is probably the oldest and most effective propaganda tactic our media uses. When our press gets hot and bothered about something, and sees a story through to its conclusion, it's almost always after a scandal has been unearthed, some smarmy, dreary secret that some "investigative journalist" has drudged up for us to consider. Congressman fondles model on boat; mayor gives rich sanitation contract to hunchbacked brother-in-law; shotgun mic catches foreign tennis player using racial slurs. It's always someone caught leaving the farm; it's never the actual farm.

We get upset about these things for a few days, a week, sometimes two weeks, and they remain on the front pages until the press forces someone's hand (a resignation, a firing, the inevitable "public apology" of the temporarily disgraced athlete before a sea of lenses).

Then the matter is forgotten, and the world goes back to normal. Placid stand-alone photos of babies and fountains reappear on the front pages. Once again it's sports scores, features about a new supernova someone has discovered 90 billion light years away, a grainy photo of Denise Richards caught at a midtown Starbucks?

The implication is clear. When there is no scandal, the world is in equilibrium. After enough of this, we start to instinctively believe that only something that was once a secret can be scandalous. Nothing that's right in front of our eyes is worth our outrage; there's no need to fix anything that's out in the open.

And that's why AIDS or homeless kids are less important than Monica Lewinsky. The machinery of our media is only designed to attack the latter.

Sometimes, of course, uncovered secrets are actually as important as they're made out to be. Watergate, for instance. Presidential administration conspires to undermine entire democratic process-important. Or Kim Philby, betraying the whole free world for decades: important.

But Jayson Blair? Screwed-up guy in way beyond his ken publishes numerous fake articles identical in tone and insipidity to real ones, spectacularly defaming the pompous jerks he works for, and turning himself into a Dennis Miller routine. Is that important, or just a sensational screw-up?

The additional angle put forward, of course, was that the Blair case revealed a general lack of editorial oversight in the newspaper business. That ostensibly elevated this isolated incident to the level of an "endemic problem."

And the logic of scandal coverage dictates that this "endemic problem" will quickly be addressed. Controls will be installed at newspapers around the country to prevent the next Jayson Blair from happening. Someone at the Times may also be disciplined or fired; there may even be other reporter-frauds there and at other papers who will be found out (the domino effect is a common phenomenon in scandal reporting: The Enron/WorldCom/Rite Aid progression is a classic example).

There's sure to be a lot of carnage, and who knows what form it will take exactly. But one thing's for sure: When it's over, people will go back to reading newspapers and watching tv with the same total confidence they had before. "Man, I'm sure glad we cleared up that Jayson Blair business, got that fixed," you will soon hear. "Now we can get back to having faith in the system that all but put Al Roker's gastric stapling on television."

It struck me late in the week that there is something terribly wrong when an overmatched stress case like Jayson Blair can be crucified and called the worst journalist in history, while the person who wrote this month's horrifying Details cover headline-"Ewan McGregor: Even Jedi Knights Shop at Wal-Mart"-can be considered an honored member of society, a person whom it is safe to leave in the company of children and the elderly.

Jayson Blair screwed up, but the Details guy does his thing intentionally, shamelessly, openly, and as a perfect expression of everything he stands for. Blair tried to hide his act, but no one tries to hide the insane terror alerts and five billion commercials a day, and Howard Fineman, and the Cosmo article that tells a woman that when her boyfriend blinks twice in a row, it means he thinks she looks fat and needs to buy a new pair of $89 Guess jeans.

Which is worse? Isn't what newspapers and magazines and tv stations do on purpose more important than what they do by mistake?