USA Today may have the highest readership of any American newspaper, but now we know not even the rag served up with skimpy pastries and bland coffee at Holiday Inn is free of crooked journalism.Two weeks ago, a group of reporters and editors impaneled by USA Today concluded that Jack Kelley, once that paper's star foreign correspondent-before his resignation in January-had fabricated at least eight stories in the past decade. Additionally, Kelley was found to have lifted text from more than 20 articles in other publications.

USA Today has been printing for 21 years, and Kelley was there since day one. It was only a matter of time before his fraudulent reporting was revealed, wasn't it? Well, according to some of his colleagues quoted in the last issue of the American Journalism Review, he was an incredibly natural fit in the newsroom-amicable, reliable and fastidious in his work.

Kelley's friend Matthew Fisher, now a Moscow correspondent for CanWest News, told the AJR that Kelley's charm is equivalent to Bill Clinton's, making all of his incredible interviews-Albanian guerrillas, Cuban refugees and Filipino rape victims-seemingly plausible.
Kelley's articles were laden with amazing detail. In an eyewitness account of an August 2001 suicide bombing at a Jerusalem pizza shop, Kelley not only claimed to have seen the bomber prior to the attack, he also watched the victims die.

"Three men, who had been eating pizza inside, were catapulted out of the chairs they had been sitting on. When they hit the ground, their heads separated from their bodies and rolled down the street," Kelley wrote. And he saw all this after being thrust to the ground from the force of the blast.

It didn't matter that Israeli police reports of that bombing gave completely different forensic details than Kelley. The only significant detail that didn't run in the Aug. 10, 2001 issue of USA Today was a bit about the eyes in the severed heads blinking for a few seconds, but that edit was probably made more for decorum's sake.

But it really was only a matter of time for Kelley. The revelations about Jason Blair prompted a USA Today editor to ask the reporting staff for any concerns about their newspaper's accuracy, and someone replied.

A tip from an anonymous USA Today staffer last year led to a 7-month investigation into Kelley's work. He resigned after a panel found that he was obstructing the investigation by inventing a corroborating witness for a 1999 report filed from Belgrade, Serbia.

USA Today's recent mea culpa spread across several pages, and was reported on in newspapers around the country. The New York Times and The Washington Post both put their takes on the incident above the fold. Kelley, it appears, not only fabricated and plagiarized, he gave scripts to people being questioned by the investigating editors and may have, as the Post reported, embezzled from travel accounts. Compared to this guy, Blair was a small-time crook.

The breadth of Kelley's lies was astounding, and as a result, USA Today's reputation is severely crippled. But most remarkable is how long it took for these journalistic breaches to come to light. The Times is just as guilty in this regard, considering Blair stayed on through myriad infractions over just a few years.

The Justice found itself to be an outlet for plagiarism after a write-up of an annual dance performance. Michael Camp, whom the Arts editors assigned to cover the event, neglected this responsibility and submitted a slightly altered version of the review of last year's show.

Camp's article was either a glaring admission of guilt or an attempt to publicly fool the editors and the readers. Fortunately, the March 2 article "Entrancing dancing in 'Standing O!' 2004" seemed to be the former; and it prompted a group of editors, a forensics team of sorts, to examine his other work. As the Justice reported on March 9, Camp plagiarized on seven articles over the course of the last two semesters.

But more surprising than the actual plagiarism itself was the apparent carelessness toward masking it in Camp's other articles. This newspaper's editors-full disclosure, I participated in the investigation-needed only Google and LexisNexis to find the correlations between original reporting and the work Camp tried to pass off on his own. If two Internet search engines are all that is needed to uncover the scourge of plagiarism, it is amazing that some reporters continue to lift from others.

So, if there is any bit of optimism that can be gathered from this latest foul-up by an allegedly skilled journalist, it is that the frauds, whether they steal writing or invent details, are eventually caught. Jack Kelley was known for his puritanical lifestyle, but he, like too many before and probably many to come, broke the first commandment of this trade: Thou shall not play with the truth.