Free Republic

Michelle Obama has spoken frequently on the campaign trail about the amount of student loans she and Barack had to take out to get through Harvard and Princeton. Worse yet, she had to pay them back! As she has many times in the past, Mrs. Obama complains about the lasting burden of student loans dating from her days at Princeton and Harvard Law School. She talks about people who end up taking years and years, until middle age, to pay off their debts. “The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your...

It was the journalistic equivalent of a drive-by shooting. The targets of Washington Post reporters Jonathan Finer and Doug Struck were two of journalism's favorites: Web loggers and the U.S. military. "Bloggers, Money, Now Weapons in Information War," read the headline over their story, which appeared last Monday. "U.S. Recruits Advocates to the Front, Pays Iraqi TV Stations for Coverage," the subhed said. "Retired soldier Bill Roggio was a computer technician living in New Jersey less than two months ago when a Marine officer half a world away made him an offer he couldn't refuse," the story began. The insinuation...

Ken Paulson took over as editor at USA Today in the wake of the Jack Kelley scandal. Kelley had embarrassed the paper by writing a series of stories filled with lies. Paulson said that would never happen again. Then, he presided over USA Today's own version of the CBS Memogate scandal. Like CBS, USA Today used those bogus documents to discredit President Bush's National Guard service. But Paulson managed to exercise a form of damage control because CBS used the documents first and put them on TV. Paulson acted as if the scandal was confined to CBS. Many in the...

Jihad Journalism: Detroit News’ Fabricated Terrorism “Reporting” May 11, 2005 By Debbie Schlussel “Former Terrorism Suspect is Deported: Moroccan . . . Was Forced to Leave,” screamed a sympathetic headline in Gannett’s Detroit News, last week. Problem is, the deportation of alleged Detroit terror cell member Ahmed Hannan never happened. Hannan is still here. And other details in the apocryphal article by Detroit News reporter David Shepardson were also wrong or made-up. The May 3, 2005 article claimed that Hannan—who planned to blow up U.S. tourist sites and a U.S. Air Force Base in Turkey—was deported two weeks before the...

If this battle is lost, the wounded could include you Manning Pynn February 20, 2005 Wounds inflicted by the war on journalism have been neither physical nor fatal, but the injuries have extended far beyond newspapers and television news programs. Recent assaults have included the following: The federal government fed fake news segments, promoting administration programs, to television stations -- some of which naively aired the tapes. The federal government paid columnists and commentators to promote its programs as though the endorsements resulted from their own evaluations. A federal appeals court ruled that, on penalty of going to jail, two...

AN open letter to my colleagues in the news business. The silence is getting loud. It's been nearly four months since the scandal broke. Four months since Jack Kelley, star foreign correspondent for USA Today, was found to have lied his way through his professional life for the last 13 years. He lied about where he had been, what he had seen, whom he had talked to, what they had said. He lied so much I'm only half convinced "Jack Kelley' is his real name. Yet you, my colleagues, have not asked the most important question: What does this mean...

<p>April 23, 2004 -- A second top editor resigned from USA Today yesterday as fallout from the scandal involving former star reporter Jack Kelley continued.</p> <p>Hal Ritter, managing editor of news, submitted his resignation to Publisher Craig Moon. He had been in his current position since 1995 and had worked at the paper since it was founded in 1982.</p>

<p>NEW YORK (CNN) - The editor of USA Today resigned Tuesday, one day after the newspaper reported that a team of its journalists had found "strong evidence" that Jack Kelley, one of its former star reporters, made up portions of stories, plagiarized and lied.</p>

www.sfgate.com USA Today finds faked stories Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times Saturday, March 20, 2004 ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/03/20/MNGR25OFG61.DTL Washington -- USA Today, one of the nation's largest-circulation newspapers, said Friday it has found that a former star foreign correspondent had made up parts of at least eight stories, committing "journalistic sins" that were "sweeping and substantial." In a front-page article, the Gannett Co. newspaper said that a team of reporters and an editor found evidence of repeated fabrications during an examination of 720 articles written by Jack Kelley between 1993 and 2003. It said the evidence "strongly...

Jack Kelley, a star foreign correspondent at USA Today before he resigned earlier this year, appears to have fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major articles in the last 10 years, including one that earned him a finalist nomination for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002, the newspaper reported yesterday. USA Today, the nation's largest-circulation newspaper, said Mr. Kelley had engaged in his deceptions around the globe, apparently inventing such accounts as his face-to-face encounter with a suicide bomber in Jerusalem, his participation in a high-speed hunt in 2003 for Osama bin Laden and his witnessing the departure of six...

USA Today said Friday that an examination of the work of journalist Jack Kelley found strong evidence that the newspaper's former star foreign correspondent had fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories, including a firsthand account of settlers shooting on a Palestinian taxi in Hebron. "As an institution, we failed our readers by not recognizing Jack Kelley's problems. For that I apologize," Publisher Craig Moon said. After spending seven weeks closely examining Kelley's work, a team of journalists also found that Kelley had lifted quotes or other material from competing publications, lied in speeches he delivered for USA...

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) - USA Today said Friday that an examination of the work of journalist Jack Kelley found strong evidence that the newspaper's former star foreign correspondent had fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories. "As an institution, we failed our readers by not recognizing Jack Kelley's problems. For that I apologize," publisher Craig Moon said. After spending seven weeks closely examining Kelley's work, a team of journalists also found that Kelley had lifted quotes or other material from competing publications, lied in speeches he delivered for USA Today and conspired to mislead the investigation into his...

<p>ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) -- USA Today said Friday that an examination of the work of journalist Jack Kelley found strong evidence that the newspaper's former star foreign correspondent had fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories.</p> <p>"As an institution, we failed our readers by not recognizing Jack Kelley's problems. For that I apologize," publisher Craig Moon said.</p>

January 26, 2004 Source for USA Today Reporter Disputes Details of Kosovo Article By JACQUES STEINBERG     A human rights advocate identified by Jack Kelley, the USA Today correspondent who resigned under pressure this month, as a source for a 1999 article about ethnic cleansing in a Kosovo village disputes many of the details in the article. The rights advocate, Natasa Kandic, the executive director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, made these assertions in a telephone interview from Belgrade late last week, raising further questions about the veracity of the article, which the newspaper published on its...

Within the offices of USA Today, there have long been two schools of thought about Jack Kelley, the longtime foreign correspondent who resigned abruptly early this month. In the view of Allen H. Neuharth, who founded the newspaper in 1982, the same year Mr. Kelley joined as an editorial assistant, his talents earned him a coveted berth: a seat on a company plane as Mr. Neuharth barnstormed the world in 1988, interviewing heads of state in 32 countries for a reporting tour he called the "Jetcapade.'' Mr. Neuharth also tapped Mr. Kelley as a co-author of two books drawn from...

NEW YORK (AP) - USA Today says it is investigating similarities between a story by a star foreign correspondent who recently resigned and one published by The Washington Post. The Sept. 2, 1998, story by former USA Today reporter Jack Kelley was about arms dealers in a small town in Pakistan. USA Today, in a story in Wednesday editions, printed side-by-side comparisons that showed similar passages in a Washington Post story from the same town two months earlier. The similarities included references to dogs not flinching after the sound of gunshots because of the frequency of gunfire in the town....

USA TODAY statement on Jack Kelley USA TODAY Editor Karen Jurgensen released the following statement regarding its investigation of foreign correspondent Jack Kelley: In recent days, USA TODAY has been a subject of controversy in other media because of the resignation of one of its best-known reporters, Jack Kelley. A foreign correspondent, Kelley was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002. USA TODAY had chosen to treat the issue as a confidential personnel matter, but because Kelley made it public and because some published accounts have contained inaccurate information, we are providing a summary of the central events that led editors...

USA Today Found Hoax Before Writer Confessed Former USA Today correspondent Jack Kelley acknowledged through his attorney yesterday that his confession to deceiving his newspaper during an investigation of his reporting came only after being presented with evidence of what he had done. The newspaper, meanwhile, now says that Kelley was forced to quit. SNIP Although USA Today has examined several Kelley stories, the focus remains on his 1999 front-page report that human rights activist Natasa Kandic, who was not named in the article, had obtained "a Yugoslav army three-ring notebook" that "contains a direct order to a lieutenant to...

When USA Today correspondent Jack Kelley resigned Tuesday after an investigation of his work, many colleagues wondered why he had quit if, as he adamantly maintained, his reports from around the world had been accurate. The reason, Kelley now acknowledges, is that he "panicked and used poor judgment" during the probe. In an effort to prove that he had spoken with a human rights activist in Yugoslavia, Kelley said in an interview, he encouraged a translator who was not present during the 1999 sit-down to impersonate another translator who was there. The woman who agreed to help Kelley called the...

When USA Today correspondent Jack Kelley resigned Tuesday after an investigation of his work, many colleagues wondered why he had quit if, as he adamantly maintained, his reports from around the world had been accurate. The reason, Kelley now acknowledges, is that he "panicked and used poor judgment" during the probe. In an effort to prove that he had spoken with a human rights activist in Yugoslavia, Kelley said in an interview, he encouraged a translator who was not present during the 1999 sit-down to impersonate another translator who was there. The woman who agreed to help Kelley called the...