Perhaps the hallmark characteristic of Raines’s editorship, though, is that he has acted as though he had taken over an institution that was profoundly broken, a bizarre approach for running a great newspaper. Unlike Marty Baron, who has moved cautiously at the Globe yet brought about significant improvements, Raines has thrashed around aggressively, making it clear that he wants young reporters without family commitments who are willing to go anywhere at a moment’s notice.

According to Village Voice media columnist Cynthia Cotts, some staff members have taken to referring to the Times newsroom under Raines as "the republic of fear." In part, as Seth Mnookin pointed out in Newsweek, the reason Blair was put on the DC-sniper story in the first place was because so many seasoned veterans had left.

And though it will never be clear how Raines allowed himself to be so thoroughly snookered, it is clear why he would be vulnerable to a smooth-talking con artist like Jayson Blair. Blair was young, he was enormously productive — and he was black, thus tapping into the central drama of Raines’s life.

IT IS ENTIRELY unsurprising that conservative critics of both Raines and the Times have been having a jolly old time over Blair’s ethnicity. "Jayson Blair is black, and I think we are seeing here today in this New York Times story the ridiculous absurdity of political correctness," Rush Limbaugh droned on Monday. "A bunch of liberals got trapped by their own belief system. A bunch of liberals got trapped by their own ideology."

Plenty of others piled on, including long-time Raines critics Mickey Kaus, of Slate, and Andrew Sullivan, whose anti-Raines posts on AndrewSullivan.com have grown increasingly caustic since he was bounced from a Times Magazine writing post by Raines. White journalist William McGowan, author of the anti-affirmative-action book Coloring the News, told MediaBistro.com that "there is a very pernicious double standard at many places and the New York Times is exhibit A."

This is, in a word, ridiculous. Yes, the Times, like most major papers, is committed to increased diversity in its overwhelmingly white newsroom. But keeping Blair despite 36 corrections and increasingly erratic behavior isn’t affirmative action — it’s a willful refusal to face the truth.

But if affirmative action isn’t the issue, there’s still no doubt that being an African-American worked for Blair. Boyd, the managing editor, is an African-American; according to Mnookin’s Newsweek piece, Boyd acted as a mentor to Blair, and the two often went outside together to smoke.

And Raines himself is the quintessential white Southern liberal. In 1992 he won a Pulitzer for a moving story about the black maid who worked for his family in the 1950s. His parents reportedly described themselves as "Lincoln Republicans," obviously no easy thing in pre-civil-rights Birmingham, and Raines frankly describes his relationship with the maid, Grady Hutchinson, as the sort of paradigm-altering experience that forever shaped his view of race and what it means to be human.

In 1998 Raines wrote a tough, signed piece on the Times editorial page blasting the Globe (owned by the New York Times Company) for forcing out columnist Patricia Smith, an African-American, while dawdling over Barnicle. (Ironically, the Globe revealed on Monday that Blair piped a few pieces as an intern for that paper before moving on to bigger and better things.)

So yes, Jayson Blair benefited from being an African-American. Then, too, Mike Barnicle benefited at the Boston Globe for two dozen years because he was a roguish Irish guy who knew how to play up to the paper’s Yankee owners. Stephen Glass benefited at the New Republic because he was a well-connected young white man with a seemingly limitless future.

In other words, there’s more than one way to push someone’s buttons. In Howell Raines, Jayson Blair had found his perfect mark.

SEVERAL WEEKS AGO, a Pulitzer-winning Times reporter, Judith Miller, wrote a front-page piece revealing that a former Iraqi official had provided the US with voluminous information about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Yet she was not allowed to interview this official, or to reveal, even, exactly what was supposedly found. (In fact, the story seems to have disappeared without a trace.)

This past Tuesday, John Tierney wrote a front-page profile of Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Tierney had apparently decided on his template ahead of time — Heinz has been described as "outspoken" and "controversial," and by God, that’s what she was going to be, even if he had to stretch an innocuous Heinz Kerry quote about Richard Nixon to do the trick.

Newspapers — even great newspapers, even the Times — are imperfect vessels for conveying what we need to know in a democratic society. Jayson Blair’s misdeeds were grotesque, perhaps the worst instance of journalistic wrongdoing in modern newspapering — worse, even, than Janet Cooke’s concocted young heroin user, a fiction that forced the Washington Post to return a Pulitzer. That, after all, involved only one story.

Yet by purging Blair, it would be wrong to think that all is now well at the Times, or in journalism. Tougher standards are needed. We all deserve better. I was struck by a comment that Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, at Harvard’s Kennedy School, made to USA Today. Jones noted that in the Times’ self-examination, the family of former POW Jessica Lynch and others said they were well aware that Blair had falsely claimed to interview them, or had interviewed them via his ubiquitous cell phone and then later wrote he had visited them in person. But they didn’t complain to the Times because they didn’t expect any better of the media. "They didn’t say, ‘Holy cow,’ this is somebody who is clearly unscrupulous.’ Instead, their response was to shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Hey, what did you expect?’" Jones was quoted as saying.

The Blair incident was, indeed, outrageous, and he had to pay.

But with the acute problem having been taken care of, the chronic problem remains. People don’t trust the media, and they have good reason not to. Perhaps Howell Raines, the great enabler, will now reflect on his mission, and work on improving his paper’s standards as assiduously as its motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print," demands.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com. Read his daily Media Log at BostonPhoenix.com.