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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3>From the New
York Times --<BR><A
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/business/media/20PAPE.html?th">http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/business/media/20PAPE.html?th</A><BR><BR>Writer's
Work in USA Today Is Called False<BR>By JACQUES STEINBERG<BR><BR>Jack Kelley, a
star foreign correspondent at USA Today before he resigned earlier this
year, appears to have fabricated substantial portions of at<BR>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<BR>reported
yesterday.<BR><BR>USA Today, the nation's largest-circulation newspaper, said
Mr. Kelley had engaged in his deceptions around the globe, apparently inventing
such<BR>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<BR>witnessing the departure of six refugees from Cuba who, he claimed,
later drowned.<BR><BR>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<BR>subvert USA Today's investigation by concocting scripts
complete with phony identities for associates to follow if his editors
tried to<BR>substantiate his work, the newspaper said.<BR><BR>The newspaper said
its investigation which began as an internal inquiry last May, and has
been presided over by three outside journalists since<BR>January is
continuing.<BR><BR>"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<BR>publisher of The Tennessean, who also oversaw USA Today's
editorial and op-ed pages from its founding until 1991. "Certainly any time
that<BR>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<BR>acknowledge it and apologize for it."<BR><BR>Mr. Seigenthaler said that
the panel, which has spoken to about 70 USA Today staff members and interviewed
Mr. Kelley for about 20 hours,<BR>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<BR>into the newspaper unchecked.<BR><BR>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<BR>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<BR>USA Today, also declined to be interviewed
yesterday.<BR><BR>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<BR>recognizing Jack Kelley's problems. For that I apologize."<BR><BR>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<BR>months at more
than a dozen newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune and The Macon Telegraph.
Newspapers have become more vigilant in investigating<BR>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<BR>than three dozen
articles.<BR><BR>Dozens of newspapers have instituted protective measures
against such fraud. They include the formulation of new ethics policies, the
placing of<BR>stricter controls on the use of anonymous sources and the sending
of questionnaires to people named in articles to determine if the reports
are<BR>accurate and fair, according to a survey conducted by the American
Society of Newspaper Editors.<BR><BR>Jay Rosen, the chairman of the journalism
department at New York University, said that the disclosure of Mr. Kelley's
journalistic sins was<BR>likely to further undermine the public's faith in the
veracity of newspapers and journalists.<BR><BR>"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.<BR><BR>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,<BR>the disclosure that one of its best-known reporters had
engaged in journalistic fraud had immediate reverberations.<BR><BR>"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<BR>imagined
could have been the story."<BR><BR>Debbie Howlett, the newspaper's Midwest
correspondent, said she was angry that no editor had come forward to accept any
responsibility for what Mr.<BR>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<BR>nearly skeptical enough of these fantastical
tales."<BR><BR>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<BR>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<BR>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<BR>editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.<BR><BR>Mr. Kelley, whose
byline first appeared in the newspaper's inaugural issue in 1982, resigned under
pressure on Jan. 6. The newspaper had discovered<BR>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<BR>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<BR>May.<BR><BR>In announcing Mr.
Kelley's resignation in an article on Jan. 13, the newspaper said it concluded a
seven-month investigation of his work<BR>without resolving whether he had
fabricated or embellished any articles in his two-decade career. At the time,
Karen Jurgensen, the newspaper's<BR>editor, was quoted in the newspaper as
saying that in many instances, "the difficulty of retracing events in distant
war-torn countries made<BR>verification impossible."<BR><BR>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<BR>appeared in The Washington
Post, the newspaper reopened its investigation, installing the outside editors
at its helm. A team of USA Today<BR>journalists read about 720 of Mr. Kelley's
articles dating from 1993 and examined closely about 150.<BR><BR>Among the
newspaper's findings was that Mr. Kelley's eyewitness account of the bombing of
a pizzeria in Jerusalem in August 2001, contained<BR>observations that the
newspaper now believes to be erroneous.<BR><BR>"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<BR>account. "When they hit the ground their heads
separated from their bodies and rolled down the street."<BR><BR>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<BR>witness such a scene.
"Regardless," the paper continued, "no adult victims were decapitated." The
article was one of nine that the newspaper's<BR>editors included in nominating
him for the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting.<BR><BR>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,"<BR>the paper wrote.<BR><BR>Atop
that article, which was later reprinted in Reader's Digest, the newspaper
published a photograph of one of the refugees that Mr. Kelley<BR>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,<BR>married, pregnant and
now living in the southeastern United States."<BR><BR>Mr. Kelley's former
colleagues said they were shocked by the lengths he had gone to deceive his
editors as they investigated his work.<BR><BR>Yesterday, the newspaper published
a script Mr. Kelley had apparently prepared for a man in Jerusalem, asking that
he play the role of "David,"<BR>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<BR>settlers" who were "shooting and beating
Palestinians."<BR><BR>"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<BR>be it. I promise. No more."<BR></DIV></FONT></FONT></BODY></HTML>