Jack Kelley (journalist)

Last updated

Jack Kelley is a former reporter for USA Today . Kelley resigned in 2004 following a scandal.

Contents

Scandal

Kelley is best known for his professional downfall in 2004, when it was revealed that he had long been fabricating stories, going so far as to write up scripts so associates could pretend to be sources during an investigation of his actions by others at the newspaper. [1]

The newspaper conducted an extensive review of Kelley's stories, sending investigators (including reporter and former mid-level editor Mark Memmott) to Cuba, Israel, and Serbia to check his work and sift through stacks of hotel records to determine if Kelley was where he claimed to be when filing stories. On 26 January 2004, Nataša Kandić of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade disputed his account of using her as a source for a July 1999 front-page story on a typed Yugoslav Army order to "cleanse" a village in Kosovo. [2]

The same month, Kelley resigned but denied the charges. [2] The USA Today publisher, Craig Moon, issued a public apology on the front page of the newspaper.[ when? ] The scandal led to the resignations of two key staff members at the newspaper, top editor Karen Jurgensen and News section managing editor Hal Ritter in April 2004.[ citation needed ]

Aftermath

Kelley sometimes did volunteer services with Free the Children. He lives with his wife, Jacki Kelley, the global chief executive for Universal McCann, a media agency based in New York, in New Canaan, Connecticut. [3]

See also

Related Research Articles

<i>Absence of Malice</i> 1981 film by Sydney Pollack

Absence of Malice is a 1981 American drama neo noir thriller film directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Paul Newman, Sally Field, Wilford Brimley, Melinda Dillon and Bob Balaban.

<i>USA Today</i> American national daily newspaper

USA Today is an American daily middle-market newspaper and news broadcasting company. Founded by Al Neuharth on September 15, 1982, the newspaper operates from Gannett's corporate headquarters in Tysons, Virginia. Its newspaper is printed at 37 sites across the United States and at five additional sites internationally. The paper's dynamic design influenced the style of local, regional, and national newspapers worldwide through its use of concise reports, colorized images, informational graphics, and inclusion of popular culture stories, among other distinct features.

<i>Der Spiegel</i> German weekly news magazine based in Hamburg

Der Spiegel is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner, a British army officer, and Rudolf Augstein, a former Wehrmacht radio operator who was recognized in 2000 by the International Press Institute as one of the fifty World Press Freedom Heroes. Typically, the magazine has a content to advertising ratio of 2:1.

<i>News of the World</i> 1843–2011 British tabloid newspaper

The News of the World was a weekly national "red top" tabloid newspaper published every Sunday in the United Kingdom from 1843 to 2011. It was at one time the world's highest-selling English-language newspaper, and at closure still had one of the highest English-language circulations. It was originally established as a broadsheet by John Browne Bell, who identified crime, sensation and vice as the themes that would sell most copies. The Bells sold to Henry Lascelles Carr in 1891; in 1969, it was bought from the Carrs by Rupert Murdoch's media firm News Limited. Reorganised into News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation, the newspaper was transformed into a tabloid in 1984 and became the Sunday sister paper of The Sun.

Jayson Thomas Blair is an American former journalist who worked for The New York Times. He resigned from the newspaper in May 2003 in the wake of the discovery of fabrication and plagiarism in his stories.

<i>Chicago Sun-Times</i> Daily newspaper in Chicago, Illinois

The Chicago Sun-Times is a daily nonprofit newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Since 2022, it is the flagship paper of the non-profit Chicago Public Media, and has long held the second largest circulation among Chicago newspapers, after the Chicago Tribune. The Sun-Times resulted from the 1948 merger of the Chicago Sun and the Chicago Daily Times newspapers. Journalists at the paper have received eight Pulitzer Prizes, mostly in the 1970s; one recipient was the first film critic to receive the prize, Roger Ebert (1975), who worked at the paper from 1967 until his death in 2013. Long owned by the Marshall Field family, since the 1980s ownership of the paper has changed hands numerous times, including twice in the late 2010s.

<i>Houston Chronicle</i> Daily newspaper in Houston, Texas, US

The Houston Chronicle is the largest daily newspaper in Houston, Texas, United States. As of April 2016, it is the third-largest newspaper by Sunday circulation in the United States, behind only The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. With its 1995 buy-out of long-time rival the Houston Post, the Chronicle became Houston's newspaper of record.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kurt Eichenwald</span> American journalist

Kurt Alexander Eichenwald is an American journalist and a New York Times bestselling author of five books, one of which, The Informant (2000), was made into a motion picture in 2009. He is senior investigative editor at The Conversation. Formerly he was a senior writer and investigative reporter with The New York Times, Condé Nast's business magazine, Portfolio, and later was a contributing editor with Vanity Fair and a senior writer with Newsweek. Eichenwald had been employed by The New York Times since 1986 and primarily covered Wall Street and corporate topics such as insider trading, accounting scandals, and takeovers, but also wrote about a range of issues including terrorism, the Bill Clinton pardon controversy, federal health care policy, and sexual predators on the Internet.

<i>The Sunday Times</i> British newspaper, founded 1821

The Sunday Times is a British Sunday newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain's quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as The New Observer. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News UK, which is owned by News Corp. Times Newspapers also publishes The Times. The two papers, founded separately and independently, have been under the same ownership since 1966. They were bought by News International in 1981.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nataša Kandić</span>

Nataša Kandić is a Serbian human rights activist and coordinator of the RECOM Reconciliation Network, founder and ex-executive director of the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC), an organization campaigning for human rights and reconciliation in the former Yugoslavia, focusing on the Serbian role in the conflict. It was formed in 1992. The HLC's research was integral to the war crimes prosecutions of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), particularly the "smoking gun" video linking Serbian military forces to the Srebrenica massacres. She has won numerous international awards for her human rights work. She is a figure of controversy in Serbia where she was the subject of a defamation lawsuit by former President of Serbia Tomislav Nikolić.

Michael Gallagher is an American newspaper editor. Gallagher was formerly an investigative journalist for Gannett News Service until he was convicted of voicemail hacking in an investigation into Chiquita's business practices. He began his career as a reporter at the Kalamazoo Gazette in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Checkbook journalism is the controversial practice of news reporters paying sources for their information. In the U.S. it is generally considered unethical, with most mainstream newspapers and news shows having a policy forbidding it. In contrast, tabloid newspapers and tabloid television shows, which rely more on sensationalism, regularly engage in the practice. In Britain and throughout Europe, journalists paying for news is fairly common.

Bill Kovach is an American journalist, former Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, former editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and co-author of the book The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and The Public Should Expect.

Julian Sher is a Canadian investigative journalist, filmmaker, author and newsroom trainer based in Montreal, Quebec. He was an investigative producer for ten years then a senior producer for five years with the CBC's The Fifth Estate. He has written extensively about outlaw motorcycle gangs, child abuse and the justice system.

William Arthur Hilliard was an American journalist. He was editor of The Oregonian, the major daily newspaper in Portland, Oregon, from 1987 to 1994 and was that newspaper's first African-American editor. He was also president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1993–94.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Foley scandal</span> Political scandal

The Mark Foley scandal, which broke in late September 2006, centers on soliciting emails and sexually suggestive instant messages sent by Mark Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida, to teenaged boys who had formerly served as congressional pages. Investigation was closed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) on September 19, 2008 citing insufficient evidence to pursue criminal charges as both "Congress and Mr. Foley denied us access to critical data," said FDLE Commissioner Gerald Bailey. The scandal grew to encompass the response of Republican congressional leaders to previous complaints about Foley's contacts with the pages and inconsistencies in the leaders' public statements. There were also allegations that a second Republican congressman, Jim Kolbe, had improper conduct with at least two youths, a 16-year-old page and a recently graduated page.

<i>The Diamondback</i> University of Maryland student newspaper

The Diamondback is an independent student newspaper associated with the University of Maryland, College Park. It began in 1910 as The Triangle and became known as The Diamondback in 1921. Now a weekly online journal, The Diamondback was published as a daily print newspaper on weekdays until 2013. It is published by Maryland Media, Inc., a non-profit organization. The newspaper receives no university funding and derives its revenue from advertising.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Seigenthaler</span> American journalist, writer, and political figure (1927–2014)

John Lawrence Seigenthaler was an American journalist, writer, and political figure. He was known as a prominent defender of First Amendment rights.

Jeffrey Taylor is an American journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize.

References

  1. Ex-USA TODAY reporter faked major stories, at USA Today, by Blake Morrison; published March 19, 2004; retrieved May 31, 2013
  2. 1 2 Jacques Steinberg (26 January 2006). "Source for USA Today Reporter Disputes Details of Kosovo Article". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 August 2012.
  3. Tucker, Neely (2011-07-22). "Whatever happened to ... the foreign correspondent who made up stories?". The Washington Post.