Lewis Lapham wrote the script for the New York Times

Andrew Sullivan, call your office! The Village Voice connects the dots between one liberal press institution and another. In an article titled “Blair Follows the Rules” Press Clips columnist Cynthia Cotts details how Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham wrote the playbook for sycophantic journalistic bootstrapping and how NYT “reporter” Jayson Blair followed its advice:

Blair's sordid rise to stardom is compelling but not unique. In 1999, a year after the budding celebrity was hired at the Times, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham wrote an ironic book called Lapham's Rules of Influence, in which he anticipated Blair's m.o. exactly. Consider just a few of Lapham's commands: Socialize with big shots ("never take an interest in people who cannot do you any favors"), polish your résumé like a work of literature, trade in gossip, dole out flattery ("cannot be too often or too recklessly applied"), and learn to tell lies ("always more welcome than the truth").

The full title is Lapham's Rules of Influence: A Careerist's Guide to Success, Status, and Self-Congratulation, and it fits Blair to a tee.

The humor here is that Lapham appeared to have written the book as a criticism of modern journalistic trends and unwittingly revealed the blueprint for Jayson Blair’s subterfuge.

In his fin-de-siècle primer on self-promotion, Lapham recalls how, sometime after 1980, ambitious college grads began to concentrate less on learning, merit, and morality and more on perfecting the navigational and social skills of a courtier. Courtiers first flourished under a monarchy, according to Lapham, but the "arts of deference" became indispensable in a status-obsessed and way-fluid democracy.

If there’s a more prescient account of King Raines and the imperial structure at the New York Times, I haven’t seen it. The liberal media saw the future and ignored it.