America’s media, already reeling from the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, has been rocked by the revelation that yet another top reporter has been making up news stories.
Jack Kelley, senior foreign correspondent for USA Today and a Pulitzer Prize nominee, has been faking major foreign news stories for several years, the paper confessed last week.
In an eerie reminder of the Blair scandal at the New York Times last year, the newspaper carried details of Kelley’s exposure on its own front page and across two pages inside the paper.
After concerns had been raised about Kelley’s work, the newspaper appointed a team of five reporters and an editor to sift through 720 stories Kelley wrote between 1993 and 2003. The probe uncovered some dramatic instances where Kelley appeared to have completely made up large parts of stories that often appeared on the front page. The news sparked a remarkable display of public contrition at the paper. ‘As an institution we failed our readers by not recognising Jack Kelley’s problems. For that I apologise,’ USA Today publisher Craig Moon said on the front page of his own newspaper.
Some of the details uncovered in the investigation of Kelley’s work were truly astonishing. The paper examined Kelley’s claim to have been an eyewitness at a 2001 suicide bombing in Jerusalem. In his original copy Kelley had written that he saw three men have their heads blown off in the blast. In a first draft of his piece he described how the heads rolled ‘with their eyes still blinking’. However, police records show that no adult victims of the blast were decapitated.
In another story Kelley visited Cuba in February 2002 and wrote a powerful piece describing a group of six refugees heading off to America in a boat. But, he claimed, a storm sank the craft a few days later and no one survived. Kelley produced a picture of a woman among the group called Yacqueline which was used along with the story. But far from dying at sea, she was tracked by the USA Today team alive and well and living in America. Her real name was Yamilet Fernández and she had worked at a hotel in Cuba before moving to America a year ago as a legal immigrant.
Kelley was one of the newspaper’s star reporters. However, he resigned last year when details of an investigation first began to appear. He had a 21-year career at the paper, visiting 86 countries and interviewing 36 heads of state.
The scope of the investigation on Kelley was huge. Reporters travelled to Cuba, Israel and Jordan and scoured records of hotel receipts, phone calls and the memory of his laptop computer. They re-interviewed dozens of people and spent at least 20 hours with Kelley himself.
Kelley was quoted in the paper’s investigation as denying the allegations. ‘I feel like I’m being set up,’ he said. But the paper also said Kelley had tried to scupper the probe by briefing people being interviewed ahead of time and telling them what to say.
Since the Blair scandal last year, which saw the top two editors of the New York Times resign, American journalism has become increasingly cautious. Other papers have seen reporters resign or be sacked after they were discovered lifting quotes or interviews from other publications without any attribution.
However, Kelley’s career might not yet be over. Blair’s book about his experiences has just been published and is reported to be selling well. – Guardian Unlimited Â