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USA Today editors ignored repeated warnings about problems with Jack Kelley's reporting, including from government officials, while a newsroom 'virus of fear' deterred many staffers from challenging what became the worst scandal in the Gannett paper's history, an investigative panel said yesterday. Kelley, who has now apologized, made up parts of at least 20 stories stretching back to 1991, according to the report by three outside editors asked to investigate the former star correspondent's work. Kelley also billed the company for thousands of dollars in payments to translators and drivers who now say they never received the cash, the panel found. The report amounts to a stinging indictment of the culture of the nation's top-selling newspaper, which the panel says has increasingly tried to compete with the New York Times and The Washington Post and trumpeted the globe-trotting exploits of Kelley, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, in that effort. The document's release prompted a key managing editor to resign. Unlike the fabrications of such young and untested journalists as The Post's Janet Cooke in 1981, the New Republic's Stephen Glass in 1998 and the Times's Jayson Blair last year, Kelley, 43, was a two-decade veteran at USA Today and a management favorite whose too-perfect stories left a trail of red flags that went unheeded. As USA Today gradually transformed itself from a bland 'McPaper' known mainly for short stories and flashy graphics, even Kelley, who kept parachuting into war zones and filing reports about dramatic shootings, bombings and drownings, said he felt pressure to produce scoops. In an extreme version of the problems that trouble many news organizations, the report depicts a rivalry-filled newsroom in which top executives failed to communicate, reporters were intimidated by their bosses and those who complained about Kelley were dismissed as jealous whiners.
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