[Media-watch] Report criticizes USA Today newsroom culture - Washington Post - 22/04/2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

Report Criticizes USA Today Newsroom Culture

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 22, 2004; 8:25 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33511-2004Apr22.html

USA Today's editors ignored repeated warnings about problems with Jack
Kelley's reporting for a decade and a newsroom virus of "fear" prevented
many staff members from speaking out about what became the worst scandal in
the Gannett paper's history, says an investigative report made public today.

Kelley made up parts of at least 20 stories stretching back to 1991, more
than double the number identified in a report last month, and cooked up
alibis to hide his deceptions, says the report by three outside editors
asked to investigate the former star correspondent's work. Kelley also
billed the company for thousands of dollars that he claimed to have paid to
translators and drivers who now say they never received the cash.

Kelley, who had steadfastly maintained he had done nothing wrong in
interviews with USA Today and The Washington Post, has finally apologized.
"I have made a number of serious mistakes that violate the values that are
most important to me as a person and as a journalist," he told his former
newspaper in a statement. "I recognize that I cannot make amends for the
harm I have caused to my family, friends, and colleagues."

Kelley resigned in early January, admitting only to a single instance of
trying to mislead the paper on a story, involving war crimes in Yugoslavia,
that he insisted was true. Had his editors been "vigilant and diligent,"
Kelley would have been caught far sooner, says the report by former
newspaper editors John Seigenthaler, Bill Hilliard and Bill Kovach. USA
Today's top editor, Karen Jurgensen, resigned Tuesday after learning of the
findings.

The report amounts to a sweeping indictment of the newsroom culture of the
nation's top-selling newspaper, whose daily circulation exceeds 2 million
but which, despite vast improvements, has never gained the reputation for
serious journalism that it craved. Kelley, 43, a Pulitzer Prize finalist,
gave USA Today some badly needed cachet.

"Kelley's status as 'the star' of the News staff, his frequent appearances
on national television, his many speeches before diverse audiences, and the
impression he conveyed that ranking executives of USA TODAY were his close
friends gave him a special standing in the minds of many staffers," the
report says. "His severest critics believed that 'the star' was
untouchable." Kelley routinely abused the paper's rules on the use of
anonymous sources, the panel found, and the rules themselves are badly
flawed and do not always require reporters to tell editors the identity of
their sources.

Among the new stories now discredited by USA Today are Kelley's reports
"that he found diaries alongside the corpses of Iraqi soldiers in 1991;
traveled to a village in Somalia to interview an aid worker in 1992;
discovered matches made from napalm that could burn through glass ashtrays
in 1993; trekked into the mountains of Yugoslavia with the Kosovo Liberation
Army in 1999; listened to a tape that captured the downing of a missionary
flight over Peru in 2000; visited with Elian Gonzalez's father inside the
father's house in Cuba in 2000; visited Osama bin Laden terrorist camps in
Afghanistan in 2001; and spent time near the cave complexes of Tora Bora in
2001."

"In addition, there appears to be no basis for a 2002 Kelley story that said
U.S. forces in Afghanistan found evidence linking two Chicago-based Islamic
charities to al-Qaeda."

In findings reminiscent of the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times,
the report also describes a dysfunctional newsroom: "Lines of communication
running both horizontally and vertically among the sections (or 'silos') at
the newspaper are palpably defective. USA TODAY operates more as four
separate newspapers in four separate 'silos' (some staffers used the word
'fiefdoms') than a single publication."

Some of Kelley's colleagues told investigators that management wasn't
interested in criticism of the paper's most prominent correspondent.

"If you complained about Jack's work, you were accused of just being
jealous," said one.

"When I said I was going to tell a senior editor I didn't believe Jack, I
was told: 'You don't want to go there,'" said another.

"I heard an editor tell a colleague that he was a malcontent because he
knocked Jack's work. I kept quiet about him," a third said.

"Two reporters who thought Kelley's sources were questionable insisted that
their bylines be removed from a story on which they had worked. They did not
want their names associated with his. One of them told us: 'At any other
newspaper when reporters ask to have their bylines taken off a story,
editors would want to know, "why?" The editor we talked to on this story
raised not a ripple. Nobody pushed to find out why we didn't trust him.'"