Red Flags On Parade

According to the Baltimore Sun, there were plenty o' red flags about Jack Kelley's work for USA Toady [not sic].

Like Red Square on May Day, it was.

Redder than a dump truck full o' red apples.

The similarities between Kelley and Jayson Blair continue to grow.

In 1992, The Washington Post protested that sections of an article by reporter Marc Fisher about refugees in Germany had been lifted by Kelley without attribution. Although dismissive at the time, USA Today recently has acknowledged concerns about the unattributed passages.

In 1997, as The Sun previously reported, Kelley misrepresented remarks made informally by a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross by attributing them to the organization's president. In the article about the Red Cross' record during the Holocaust, the comments were described as having been made during a heated exchange between the group's president and Kelley. Though he defended his account at the time as accurate, Kelley acknowledged in January making what he termed a "minor mistake."

In February 2002, a fellow reporter and an editor removed quotations from an article about U.S.-led efforts to capture Osama bin Laden because they could not verify the existence of all of Kelley's sources.

A fourth incident, in particular, also could have served as warning sign.

On Aug. 26, 1999, Kelley wrote a front-page article on Russian money-laundering that appeared to be a scoop for the newspaper. It stated that unnamed U.S., British and Russian law enforcement officials said, "Russian organized crime figures laundered at least $15 billion through two New York banks at the direction of President Boris Yeltsin's government." The article continued: "The officials said in interviews that the money includes at least $10 billion in International Monetary Fund loans."

The latter amount represented more than half the approximately $17.5 billion loaned to Russia by the IMF from 1995 through 1999, according to IMF records that are available on its Web site.

But no other media outlet could confirm those figures, and U.S. government officials told other Washington-based USA Today reporters that the story seriously inflated the scope of the operation. Guilty pleas won later by federal prosecutors involved far smaller amounts of money. To this day, the IMF maintains that there is no evidence that any loans were wrongly diverted. Though the paper didn't print a correction of the story, its future articles largely retreated from the claims of Kelley's initial reporting.

For regular readers of Howard Kurtz's work, Jack Kelley was a USA Today international reporter who fabricated and/or plagiarized numerous news stories over the past five years, including one for which he was nominated for the Pulitizer Prize.