Ex-reporter has the last laugh

FORMER New York Times reporter Jayson Blair said he “couldn’t stop laughing” when the newspaper corrected his fraudulent description of an American POW’s home in West Virginia, according to excerpts of an interview with the New York Observer.

"That's my favourite, just because the description was so far off from the reality. And the way they described it in The Times story someone read a portion of it to me I couldn't stop laughing," Blair said in an interview scheduled for publication yesterday.

In one of his few interviews since resigning from the Times on May 1, Blair told the Observer that he "fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism" with his reporting.