Unbelievable!

It is, or should be, a time of gritty soul-searching for the American news media. Recent events have called into question the vigilance of one of the world’s oldest and most fiercely defended free presses.

While a few left-leaning editorials are singing sombre apologies for the media’s gullibility leading up to the Iraq War, a more bipartisan dirge – about media consolidation, budget cutbacks and declining newsroom standards – surges briefly whenever a new Jayson Blair pops out of the woodwork.

The latest journalistic fraud, a superstar foreign correspondent for the nation’s best selling newspaper, goes by the name of Jack Kelley. His story ought not to pass by unexamined.

Kelley resigned from USA Today in January, under suspicion of large-scale plagiarism and fabrication, perpetrated over a 21-year career that earned him five Pulitzer Prize nominations. The paper set up an independent panel to investigate. Something was awry, but readers could rest assured that lessons were being learned and steps would be taken.

One valuable lesson – in corporate damage control, at least – was The New York Times‘s handling of the Jayson Blair debacle: a cautionary tale in how not to come clean about cheating reporters if your editors value their jobs. The Times wasted no time in printing a massive and long-winded apology, complete with grimy details of Blair’s prolific fabrications. A fortnight later, the top brass was gone.

Determined, perhaps, to dampen the shock of Kelley’s blow, staunch the bleeding, USA Today is trickling out its findings more gradually. So far, the strategy seems to be working: Kelley’s dishonesty has garnered far less media attention than Blair’s. Calls for further resignations are trailing off as the scandal gradually fizzles.

But Kelley’s rap sheet, still incomplete at this writing, makes his forerunner look strictly small-time. Blair lied about datelines and put imaginary tobacco fields in front of people’s houses. Kelley’s long list of discredited stories features some of the most lurid and incendiary accounts of human brutality and suffering in recent memory, set in some of the world’s most volatile conflicts.

One report, datelined Hebron, West Bank, appeared in September 2001, a year after the start of the current Palestinian intifada.

‘After a quick prayer,” the article begins, ‘Avi Shapiro and 12 other Jewish settlers put on their religious skullcaps, grabbed their semi-automatic rifles and headed towards Highway 60— As they crouched in a ditch beside the road, Shapiro, the leader of the group, gave the settlers orders: Surround any taxi, ‘open fire’ and kill as many of the ‘blood-sucking Arab’ passengers as possible.”

In addition to reaching the newspaper’s 5.4 million readers, the story was distributed widely over the Web and on partisan newsgroups. It now transpires, nearly two years later, that Avi Shapiro and his thugs were figments of Kelley’s imagination.

Another report centres on a youth at a Pakistani madrassah, or Islamic school, who, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, shows Kelley a picture of Chicago’s Sears Tower and proclaims, ‘This one’s mine.”

The ‘Sears Tower kid,” as he came to be known, was held up by many, including at least one prominent television journalist, as an icon of Islamic anti-Americanism. Like Avi Shapiro, he never existed.

Kelley’s astounding dishonesty compels us to ask some familiar but thorny questions. Among the most urgent: what leads reporters to lie, and how do they get away with it for so long?

The answers are by no means obvious. Jayson Blair tried, disingenuously, to pin insidious racism on his colleagues in mitigation for his transgressions. Kelley is a white male. Blair struggled with drug-addiction, alcoholism and professional disillusionment. Kelley, until recently, seemed a paragon of zealous rectitude; a devout Christian, who wrote, of his own work, in Christian Reader magazine: ‘I feel God’s pleasure when I write. It isn’t because of the glory, but because God has called me to proclaim the truth.”

One thing Blair and Kelley did have in common was the ultra-competitive culture in which they worked. With incessant pressures on profit margins, the sword of Damocles looms over the modern news desk every time budgets get cut or bureaus merge, but the happy few who shine can look forward to television contracts, prestigious awards and seven-figure book deals. According to Ben Bagdikian, author of The Media Monopoly, ‘The culture of being successful, plus the rewards for being spectacular, have infected the old discipline that the one thing you can’t do is lie to your readers.”

This may provide some clues as to why fellow journalists at USA Today were reluctant to rat on their colleague, despite new evidence that concerns existed long before Kelley resigned. Any accusations levelled against the star employee – the only USA Today reporter ever nominated for a Pulitzer – might have been dismissed as the rants of a jealous rival.

But what about the readers? In hindsight, it is easy enough to spot the gaping holes in Kelley’s stories. Why did readers not raise a collective eyebrow when, for example, Avi Shapiro and his ultra-orthodox cohorts donned their skullcaps only after morning prayers? Even non-orthodox Jews cover their heads to pray, and the orthodox wear skullcaps all the time.

It is now emerging that a few readers did question the veracity of that story and others, but their appeals were ignored. Perhaps the letters were simply lost in the torrents of complaints that inevitably clog up editors’ inboxes after reportage on a contentious subject. Or perhaps editors were simply unprepared to question the credentials of the one guy on their staff whose talent for being in the right place at the right time almost defied belief. Almost.

Either way, the newspaper has a great deal to answer for.

In the meantime, Kelley’s creations live on in the pages of thousands of websites and other partisan publications. Pro-Israeli sites carry his graphic descriptions of the aftermath of the 2001 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem Pizza parlour, complete with decapitated heads rolling down the street – details which, it has subsequently emerged, he could not possibly have witnessed. Their political opponents continue to exhibit Avi Shapiro as a poster child for the brutality of the Israeli occupation. He may even have found his way into a Pakistani madrassah.

We do know that his fame extends to the neo-Nazi propaganda circuit. On Overthrow.com, an American white supremacist site, the full text of Kelley’s article can be found under the headline, ‘Jewish Settlers Launch Campaign of Genocide Against Arab Civilians: Kike Hatred Boils Over in West Bank.”

Incredibly, many of Kelley’s discredited stories were still available on the USA Today site at this writing, without so much as a disclaimer.

The vicious characters that made Jack Kelley a superstar never existed. But when next we hear of an atrocity conceivably inspired by hatred of Avi Shapiro or The Sears Tower kid, people like Kelley, and those who could have stopped him, would do well to consider that the stains on their hands might be blood, not ink.

Tim Spira is The Media’s columnist in New York.