March 30, 2004

Jack Kelley, USA Today's star foreign correspondent, was found to have fabricated and plagiarized many of his major stories, and his tumble from journalism's firmament to its dung heap has provoked a flurry of questions about the nature of the news business.

After scrutinizing hundreds of stories Kelley wrote from 1993 to 2003, a panel of investigators found he was guilty of "journalistic sins" that were "sweeping and substantial." Kelley has covered some of the most significant foreign stories of the last decade and his work was widely showcased in the nation's largest newspaper. Kelley denies any wrongdoing.

His case instantly evokes comparisons to that of Jayson Blair, who lost his job at The New York Times last year for plagiarizing and fabricating material in at least 35 articles over a period of two years.

One of the questions to come out of this, unfortunately, concerns race. Specifically, why have Kelley's misdeeds received far less media coverage than similar transgressions committed by Blair? Since Blair is black and Kelley white, could race account for the difference? Is there a double standard in reproaching fallen journalists?

Pundits, especially those on the right, readily linked Blair's fall to The New York Times' liberal quest for media diversity. Many used the Blair affair to vindicate their anti-affirmative action arguments. Others pointed to books like Bernard Goldberg's "Bias" and William McGowan's "Coloring the News," which argue that efforts to create diverse newsrooms have gone astray.

Kelley, 43, had worked for USA Today since its 1982 inception and is the only Pulitzer Prize finalist in the paper's history. He resigned in January.

There are plausible reasons unconnected to race that could explain the coverage disparity. For example, news about The New York Times is bigger because of the paper's prestige and because of its prominence as a right-wing target.

But there is little doubt that the racial angle of the Blair scandal elevated it beyond the provincial concerns of the media business and into mainstream discussions of affirmative action and the role of "political correctness" in the corruption of journalism. Blair's bespectacled brown face even made the cover of Newsweek.

Kelley, who has yet to make a national splash, apparently left a dense trail of lies and trickery. The panel concluded that Kelley's conduct was a "sad and shameful betrayal of public trust."

Among his many dubious stories is one that earned widespread plaudits and almost earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 2002. He claimed to have witnessed a suicide bombing in Israel and said he saw decapitated heads roll down the street.

Kelley also claimed in print to have visited a terrorist crossing point on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, to have witnessed Cubans make a doomed attempt to escape by boat to Florida, to have spent a night with Egyptian terrorists, to have gone on a high-speed hunt for Osama bin Laden and to have done many things that appear to have likely never happened.

Kelley's fabrications were so audacious they defied his editors' disbelief. Who would make up such stuff?

The investigators also said Kelley lied in his speeches to outside groups.

The magnitude of his offense was far larger than that of the 27-year-old Blair, but media attention has not been commensurate.

"In its global scope and decade-long duration, the plagiarism and fakery that USA Today attributes to Kelley surpasses that of Jayson Blair," wrote media expert Howard Kurtz in the March 20 Washington Post. Yet Kurtz wonders a week later on his CNN television show, "Reliable Sources," why Jack Kelley is "getting just barely a fraction of the media attention?"

Will Kelley's fall cast suspicions on the competence of middle-aged white journalists? Kelley also is an evangelical Christian who told Christian Reader magazine in its April 2001 edition that he is in journalism because "God called me to proclaim truth." Will his ruin make things bad for fellow Christians?

I don't think so.

Salim Muwakkil is senior editor of In These Times magazine (www.inthesetimes.com), a Chicago-based publication, and a contributing writer to the Chicago Tribune. He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.