Jack Kelley
|
|
Jack Kelley was a longtime USA Today correspondent and nominee for the Pulitzer Prize. In March 2004, it came out that he had long been fabricating stories, going so far as to write up scripts so associates could pretend to be sources. The scandal of Kelley, a devout Christian and faculty member of the Christian World Journalism Institute, led some commentators to suggest that some of Kelley's fabrications may have been religiously motivated.
The newspaper did an extensive review of Kelley's stories, including sending investigators, including Mark Memmott (and editor at USA Today) to Cuba, Israel, and Jordan, and sifting through stacks of hotel records to determine if Kelley was in the locations he claimed to be filing stories from. Kelley resigned, but denied the charges. The USA Today publisher, Craig Moon, issued a public apology on the front page of the newspaper.
Many remarked on the similarity of this scandal to that of the Jayson Blair situation at the New York Times, although given the greater centrality of the Times, the Blair scandal received more attention. In a sense, Kelley's fakery was more akin to that of Stephen Glass, in that both men fabricated compelling stories that drew national and political attention, rather than (as was chiefly the case for Blair) incidental facts. Further, some have blamed Kelley's inventions for fanning racial hatred and reinforcing stereotypes.
Kelley was also a faculty member of the World Journalism Institute, an organization dedicated to creating "Christian worldview journalists" who "accompany reporting with [...] a perspective committed to the final authority of the Bible as the inerrant written word of God".[1] (http://web.archive.org/web/20010309065500/www.worldji.com/mission.asp)