Kelley Report: Required Reading for Newsrooms

By: Greg Mitchell "Amazingly, editors who paid no attention to internal and external complaints about Kelley finally acted on an anonymous letter that was no more specific than many of the reports about him that had been ignored for years." This quote, from the full report of the team probing the Jack Kelley scandal at USA Today, is only one of dozens in the document that should make it required reading this week for editors, executives and reporters in the newspaper industry.

Carried in 10 parts on the paper's Web site, with some sensitive material "deleted," it lays bare the many factors contributing to Kelley's crimes, with a special emphasis on the "climate of fear" at the paper, which the report says is still "alive and sick in the News section."

What is shocking, even after all the Kelley-related anecdotes of the past few weeks, is how long and how thoroughly editors had been alerted to his possible misdeeds and how strenuously they had rebuffed the warnings.

Among those offering warnings: "officials from the White House, the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, the Department of State and the intelligence community." After awhile, they ceased complaining because the paper did nothing about them.

Surely it is revelations such as that -- and many more -- that led to the resignation of Editor Karen Jurgenson this week.

A typical passage from the full report:

"People in the newsroom who raised questions about Kelley say they were warned by peers 'to just keep your heads down.' One reporter, whose instinctive reaction to a Kelley exclusive would have kept it out of the paper had she been an editor, described the reason she did not challenge it earlier: 'The culture tells you every day that you give your superior whatever he or she wants in order to look good." Another explained it this way: 'I was told not to tell my editors because, 'They'll knock your head off.' Some staff members called the News department 'The House of Mean.'"