Did newspaper culture make deceit inevitable?

For anybody who believes that American journalism counts for something that can’t be entirely compressed onto a corporate ledger’s bottom line, this has been a heartbreaking and sobering year.

Both the country’s most influential newspaper, the New York Times, and its largest, USA Today, have been rocked to their very foundations by the worst sort of scandal a news organization can endure: reporters who betrayed their readers’ trust with fabrications, plagiarism and lies.

Jayson Blair’s victimization of the New York Times and its readers has been widely covered; less so Jack Kelley’s misconduct at USA Today, though it was far more extensive -- apparently extending over a decade -- and more consequential, because he was the paper’s star foreign correspondent rather than a novice reporter, like Blair. Kelley resigned from the paper in January after he was caught suborning foreign translators he’d once employed to obstruct the paper’s investigation into allegations against him.

Since then, like the New York Times before it, USA Today has forthrightly probed the scope of Kelley’s deceit and informed its readers of what’s been found. A team of five reporters and an editor has been reexamining 150 of the 720 stories Kelley filed from 1993 to 2003. In a story published late last month, they reported finding “strong evidence that Kelley fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories, lifted nearly two-dozen quotes or other material from competing publications and conspired to mislead those investigating his work.”

As part of its internal probe, USA Today also asked three journalistic elder statesmen -- Bill Kovach, who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, John Seigenthaler, the paper’s founding editorial director, and Bill Hilliard, former editor of the Oregonian in Portland -- to oversee the investigation and to examine the paper’s culture and make recommendations to Publisher Craig A. Moon. He got them this week.

Friday, however, USA Today’s founder, retired Gannett Chief Executive Al Neuharth, used his column to attribute Kelley’s misconduct to failures on the part of his editors. “When big-time blunders occur in any workplace, the boss or bosses usually are at fault,” Neuharth wrote. “Not reporters. The buck stops with the boss.”

Neuharth went on to seemingly excuse Moon as a “relatively new publisher-boss” who has “promised a new environment.” No such dispensation was granted the paper’s editor, Karen Jurgensen, or executive editor, Brian Gallagher. In the aftermath of the Blair affair, the New York Times’ top two news executives, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, were forced to resign.

Neuharth, however, has an interesting analysis of the climate in which Kelley’s fraud spree occurred. “In the beginning, 22 years ago, USA Today had a nationally oriented but down-home style. Big-city journalists scoffed and labeled us ‘McPaper.’ But readers across the USA loved it, and circulation soared. A decade or so later, new bosses with more Tiffany-like tastes went upscale and global.

“Growth slowed.... Real or self-imposed pressure grew to grab new readers and prizes. Kelley’s deceptions from faraway places followed, spanning 10 years.”

Parallel scandals

The New York Times, with its studied, sophisticated traditionalism, and USA Today, with its self-conscious, zippy populism, are, in many ways, polar opposites. But there are parallels to their respective scandals that make their cases broadly instructive.

One, as Neuharth suggests in his own ineffable fashion, has to do with changing newsroom cultures. When Raines succeeded Joseph Lelyveld as the Times’ executive editor, he embarked on a frenetic campaign to, as he said, “increase the paper’s metabolism.” An urgent new premium was placed on ultra-aggressive reporting and quick hits. The unscrupulous Blair played to that appetite. What better way to be the fastest reporter on the street and the fastest rising guy in the newsroom than to just go home and make the whole thing up?

Kelley benefited from something similar, though at a somewhat slower pace. USA Today was conceived as the nation’s “second read,” a newspaper you might pick up in addition to your regular paper or when you were away from home. But the executives who succeeded Neuharth weren’t satisfied with that role, and one of the ways they attempted to escape it was by providing their readers with foreign news, a high prestige item. The problem was that they thought they could do it on the cheap. (Gannett doesn’t have the highest profit margin (18%) among publicly traded newspaper companies for nothing.)

Instead of establishing foreign bureaus or hiring resident correspondents who might actually speak the local language, USA Today sent Kelley careening, sometimes by corporate jet, around the world. Like Blair, he knew just how to capitalize on the situation: Get yourself a hotel room, plug in the old laptop and start making up something eye-catching. Think of it as a one-man franchise operation: Scoops R Us.

Both Blair and Kelley also were accomplished con men with a flair for exploiting their employers’ better instincts. In Blair’s case, that meant taking advantage of the fact that he is African American and that the Times is eager to diversify its newsroom. He also apparently benefited from Raines’ personal desire to assist reporters who apparently had overcome a substance abuse problem. For his part, Kelley made a floridly public show of his evangelical Christianity, something some of his colleagues feel cast a penumbra of squeaky clean integrity around his ostensibly swashbuckling exploits. He also traded on his close and longtime friendships with the paper’s senior executives and on his wife’s position as one of USA Today’s executive vice presidents. Which middle-level editor is going to risk a face-off with a guy who’s on a first-name basis with his boss’s boss?

Finally, there’s an issue that Kovach, who declined to discuss his panel’s findings, was willing to make in an interview. “Both Blair and Kelley went to the University of Maryland’s journalism school,” he pointed out. “Now, it’s a very good school with a good faculty, but it also happens to be next to Washington, which means it’s deeply embedded in what’s probably the world’s largest collection of celebrity journalists. Those journalists visit the school all the time, and some students are bound to model themselves on them. Then they graduate and go into a world where more and more editors are concerned with branding, and the easiest and cheapest way to brand your news operation is with a star journalist.

“That how you get Jack Kelley the star,” he said, “and Jayson Blair the star-in-waiting.”

Kovach’s point is a telling one. What’s often called a paper’s “culture” is the organizational equivalent of the body’s immune system. It is a complex web of confidences and trusts that paradoxically relies on a reflexive skepticism and habits of inquiry for its health. Rash or ill-considered change can batter that system. Even laudable considerations -- like diversifying the staff or demonstrating respect for a colleague’s religious convictions -- can cripple it because, however desirable, they ultimately are extraneous to journalistic integrity.

Interestingly, neither the Blair nor Kelley scandals have anything to do with the now-ubiquitous chat show jaw-grinding over the media’s alleged political bias. Neither man seems to have had any recognizable politics, let alone an actual ideology. All they seemed to possess was boundless ambition and an absence of moral inhibition.

In the end, they are like those colorless but incredibly destructive characters who were uncovered spying for the Soviets toward the end of the Cold War. Almost to a man they were little people, who betrayed not out of conviction, but for money -- and, perhaps, the dark thrill of deceit.