BY DAN
KENNEDY
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See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
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Friday, March 19, 2004
EYE WITNESS NEWS. So I'm
reading bits and pieces of USA Today's account of former
reporter Jack Kelley's literally incredible fabrications. It took me
a while, but finally I got it: what the paper describes as
"[p]erhaps the most riveting story Jack Kelley wrote" was
also something that his editors had doubts about all
along.
The story involved a suicide
bombing that took place in Jerusalem on August 9, 2001. The
deconstruction
that USA Today publishes today is worth reading in full. But
check out this paragraph:
Kelley could not have seen
three men decapitated. He wrote in his story: "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." In a
first draft that Kelley submitted for publication, he wrote that
some of the heads rolled "with their eyes still
blinking."
This is an astounding detail. No
editor in his or her right mind would take it out. Except, possibly,
for one reason: a suspicion that it wasn't true, that Kelley
hadn't actually witnessed such a horrifying event. So what did
the editors do? They removed the most compelling - and most obviously
fabricated - detail, and left the rest of the story pretty much
alone.
USA Today deserves credit
for coming clean about Kelley. But there remains much that hasn't yet
been reported about the culture that allowed him to thrive.
posted at 3:36 PM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
