By: E&P Staff In his regular Friday column in the newspaper he founded, USA Today, Al Neuharth accepts some blame for the Jack Kelley scandal but seems to lay most of it at the feet of a former editor -- not Karen Jurgensen, who resigned last week -- and publisher.
Neuharth notes that Tom Curley, now president of the Associated Press, was USA Today's "top boss as publisher from 1991 to 2003, the entire period of Kelley's capers." And he mentions that Dave Mazzarella, now editorial director of Stars & Stripes, was editor of USA Today from 1994 to 1999.
Investigators looking into the Kelley affair declared last week that in 1995 the publisher and editor "dramatically" abandoned our original "no anonymous sources" rule, Neuharth observes. "Their new policy," he writes, "had a stated goal of making USA Today more competitive, but it gave Kelley a vehicle with which to run wild."
Jurgensen "should have caught Kelley earlier, but she actually inherited the mess that did her in from a series of white males," Neuharth claims.
Neuharth admits that Kelley was hired on his watch and helped co-author two of his books. "Clearly, I failed in trying to teach Kelley about honesty and accuracy in journalism. It either didn't take or didn't keep."
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