The newspaper USA Today on Tuesday went public with its own Jayson Blair-style scandal, delivering another hammer blow to the reputation of American journalism.
The national newspaper printed a half-page mea culpa, admitting that its star foreign correspondent, Jack Kelley, had ”repeatedly misled editors” during a seven-month internal investigation into the veracity of his work.
Kelley (43) had been with the paper since its launch in 1982 and was a Pulitzer prize finalist in 2002. He was forced to resign last week.
On one occasion, the paper said, Kelley invented a witness to corroborate a story he reported from Belgrade in 1999. He confessed to the hoax two months later, but only after the paper had found he had convinced a Russian translator to pretend she had been at the interview in question. ”By engaging in a deception, he violated the first responsibility of any journalist: to tell the truth,” the paper’s editor, Karen Jurgensen, said in a separate, lengthy statement on the USA Today website.
The inquiry was sparked by a tip-off in May, after the New York Times admitted that its reporter, Jayson Blair, had invented stories.
The inquiry’s focus was the Belgrade article published in July 1999 that claimed that UN investigators had found army papers linking the then president, Slobodan Milosevic, to ”ethnic cleansing”.
A key source of Kelley’s apparently would not support the story, the paper said. He then invented a witness and changed his version of events several times.
The paper published Kelley’s rebuttal. He said he was the victim of professional jealousy. ”Every story published under my byline has been accurate,” he said. – Guardian Unlimited Â