Any appraisal of how Jack Kelley got away with years of fraudulent news reporting at USA TODAY, despite numerous, well-grounded warnings that he was fabricating stories, exaggerating facts and plagiarizing other publications, must begin with this question:
Why did newsroom managers at every level of the paper ignore, rebuff and reject years of multiple serious and valid complaints about Kelley's work?
The way the print media gets away with being a partisan organ while crying objectivity is that they find the news they want to cover. What these ambitious men did to get ahead was invent the kinds of news stories that fit an editor's prejudice. They weren't questioned because the stories either seemed right or were convenient to the overall message.
To believe that any media outlet is objective is to believe that a media outlet is oblivious to the power they hold in society at large. Promos for local news in Orlando are usually about how restaurants are poisoning us or how our wheels are just miles from flying off the axel. Their prejudice isn't even political, but it's hardly objective.
The New York Times, The New Republic and USA Today not only share the distinction of hiring fiction reporters, they also shared the belief that a President who lies under oath is fit to remain in office. A respect for the truth must begin at the highest level. Because it is always easier to lie than to be truthful, any leader who shows no outrage at liars will be lied to. That's why the people who were caught lying weren't ashamed. Their bosses didn't value the truth until the heat was on.
The truth isn't just some relic that is to be dusted off for convenience. It's either respected as a universal good by the culture or it becomes irrelevant to whatever the current ambition is.
There is no situational virtue either. Parents who defended Clinton’s behavior and his denial that oral sex was sex will have no moral authority when their own 12 year old daughter and the quarterback go down south. It will be a happy day for many a quarterback but not quite the harvest that progressive parents were expecting at the time.
It would be trite to say that one reaps what they sew, wouldn't it?
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