Posted on 03/20/2004 7:50:41 PM PST by Valin
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 refugees from Cuba who, he claimed, later drowned.
Mr. Kelley, 43, is also accused of using at least two dozen passages from the work of other news organizations without attribution and trying to subvert USA Today's investigation by concocting scripts — complete with phony identities — for associates to follow if his editors tried to substantiate his work, the newspaper said.
The newspaper said its investigation — which began as an internal inquiry last May, and has been presided over by three outside journalists since January — is continuing.
"In our view, it was a sad and shameful betrayal of the public trust," said the chairman of the panel, John Seigenthaler, the former editor and publisher of The Tennessean, who also oversaw USA Today's editorial and op-ed pages from its founding until 1991. "Certainly any time that happens, it hurts a newspaper, it hurts a newspaper's staff, and the only way I think to exorcise the damage is to disclose the problem and acknowledge it and apologize for it."
Mr. Seigenthaler said that the panel, which has spoken to about 70 USA Today staff members and interviewed Mr. Kelley for about 20 hours, expected to submit a report to the newspaper's publisher in "the near future" that would seek to explain how such deceptions could have gone into the newspaper unchecked.
Lisa Banks, a lawyer for Mr. Kelley, said neither she nor Mr. Kelley had any comment on yesterday's findings, which the newspaper reported in a front-page article and two full pages inside its main news section. Executives for the newspaper, as well as at Gannett, the parent company of USA Today, also declined to be interviewed yesterday.
But in the newspaper's article, Craig Moon, the newspaper's publisher, was quoted as saying: "As an institution, we failed our readers by not recognizing Jack Kelley's problems. For that I apologize."
The revelation of Mr. Kelley's deceptions is but the latest example of incidents of plagiarism and fabrication that have come to light in recent months at more than a dozen newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune and The Macon Telegraph. Newspapers have become more vigilant in investigating and policing such incidents since Jayson Blair, a former reporter at The New York Times, was found last May to have fabricated portions of more than three dozen articles.
Dozens of newspapers have instituted protective measures against such fraud. They include the formulation of new ethics policies, the placing of stricter controls on the use of anonymous sources and the sending of questionnaires to people named in articles to determine if the reports are accurate and fair, according to a survey conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Jay Rosen, the chairman of the journalism department at New York University, said that the disclosure of Mr. Kelley's journalistic sins was likely to further undermine the public's faith in the veracity of newspapers and journalists.
"For a lot of the casual public, it's one more piece of evidence against an institution they feel they can't trust," Mr. Rosen said.
At USA Today, which has an average weekday circulation of more than two million readers and is the flagship of the Gannett chain of newspapers, the disclosure that one of its best-known reporters had engaged in journalistic fraud had immediate reverberations.
"I'm speechless," said Dennis Cauchon, a reporter for USA Today since 1987. "Of course, we're all talking about it. It far exceeded what anyone imagined could have been the story."
Debbie Howlett, the newspaper's Midwest correspondent, said she was angry that no editor had come forward to accept any responsibility for what Mr. Kelley had done. "Yes, Jack fabricated many, many stories," she said. "But he was aided and abetted by editors who were hungry for prizes and weren't nearly skeptical enough of these fantastical tales."
At 1:30 p.m. yesterday, about 150 members of USA Today's newsroom staff gathered in the auditorium of its headquarters in McLean, Va., for a hastily arranged, town-hall-style meeting convened by Mr. Moon and led by the panel of three outside editors. In addition to Mr. Seigenthaler, they include William A. Hilliard, a former editor of The Oregonian, and Bill Kovach, a former Washington bureau chief at The New York Times and former editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Mr. Kelley, whose byline first appeared in the newspaper's inaugural issue in 1982, resigned under pressure on Jan. 6. The newspaper had discovered that Mr. Kelley had arranged for a woman who had not been involved in the reporting of a 1999 article — written ostensibly from Belgrade — to pass herself off to his editors as a translator. The inquiry that led to Mr. Kelley's resignation had been triggered by an anonymous complaint last May.
In announcing Mr. Kelley's resignation in an article on Jan. 13, the newspaper said it concluded a seven-month investigation of his work without resolving whether he had fabricated or embellished any articles in his two-decade career. At the time, Karen Jurgensen, the newspaper's editor, was quoted in the newspaper as saying that in many instances, "the difficulty of retracing events in distant war-torn countries made verification impossible."
But after being alerted that an article Mr. Kelley wrote from Pakistan in 1998 contained a number of passages similar to an article that had appeared in The Washington Post, the newspaper reopened its investigation, installing the outside editors at its helm. A team of USA Today journalists read about 720 of Mr. Kelley's articles dating from 1993 and examined closely about 150.
Among the newspaper's findings was that Mr. Kelley's eyewitness account of the bombing of a pizzeria in Jerusalem in August 2001, contained observations that the newspaper now believes to be erroneous.
"Three men, who had been eating pizza inside, were catapulted out of the chairs they had been sitting on," Mr. Kelley wrote in the front-page account. "When they hit the ground their heads separated from their bodies and rolled down the street."
USA Today wrote yesterday that Mr. Kelley, "by his own account, 90 feet away and his back to the pizzeria," would have been hard-pressed to witness such a scene. "Regardless," the paper continued, "no adult victims were decapitated." The article was one of nine that the newspaper's editors included in nominating him for the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting.
Another article, Mr. Kelley's front-page account, in February 2000, of six Cuban refugees who drowned in a storm "was a lie from start to finish," the paper wrote.
Atop that article, which was later reprinted in Reader's Digest, the newspaper published a photograph of one of the refugees that Mr. Kelley said he had taken days before the voyage that would claim her life. The newspaper said it had recently located the woman, and that she is "alive, married, pregnant and now living in the southeastern United States."
Mr. Kelley's former colleagues said they were shocked by the lengths he had gone to deceive his editors as they investigated his work.
Yesterday, the newspaper published a script Mr. Kelley had apparently prepared for a man in Jerusalem, asking that he play the role of "David," an Israeli intelligence agent who might assure his editors of the accuracy of an article he had written from Hebron in 2001 about "vigilante Jewish settlers" who were "shooting and beating Palestinians."
"I need you to be `David' one more time," Mr. Kelley implored in the message, which was dated July 18, 2003 and found on his laptop. "This will be it. I promise. No more."
These guys make Comical Ali look credible, and they no doubt, trumpet Kerry's claim of a President Bush credibility gap.
These guys make Comical Ali look credible, and they no doubt, trumpet Kerry's claim of a President Bush credibility gap.
I don't think so. I recently read a speech he gave. He sound like a born-again Christian. He attributed all this success to god, repeatedly throughout the speech. He thought God was working through him.
This reporter "gets it".
But Carl Bernstein, still recovering from his alcohol and substance abuse, recently said that they would only reveal Deep Throat's identity when he's dead. What a scam; a dead guy can't deny it. What if Woodward and Bernstein were to die first? I don't believe we'll ever know.
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