Watchdogs see good in latest US media scandal

NEW YORK - Word of another newspaper reporter violating journalistic ethics hit media circles this week, but some industry watchdogs said today the case involving a USA Today reporter showed the positive effects of self-policing after recent scandals.

Tom Squitieri, a 16-year veteran reporter for the paper, resigned from USA Today after the paper learned he had taken quotes from another newspaper for a front-page story on US military armored Humvees without attributing them.

"Squitieri's actions violated USA Today's standards on sources and attribution," the paper's editor, Kenneth Paulson, said in a statement on Thursday. "USA Today apologises to its readers. Squitieri has apologised and resigned."

Some observers offered a positive spin on the incident.

"It shows that we editors do care and pay attention and get rid of people that do things like this," said Mike Hoyt, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Said New Yorker magazine media writer Ken Auletta: "The reporter made a mistake and they caught him. That's good. An editor checking on a reporter's possible abuses, checking facts, challenging us. Good for him."

Scandals in the last two years have embarrassed the media and made editors more vigilant about possible improprieties, experts said.

A year ago, USA Today's star foreign correspondent, Jack Kelley, resigned after an internal investigation found he had repeatedly fabricated and plagiarised material.

The Kelley case followed a year after New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was fired for the same offenses in a scandal that rocked the esteemed paper and led to the resignations of two of its top editors.

"What used to be a small scandal in one newsroom now is becoming public knowledge," said Hoyt. "In a way it's a good thing. It shows that we care about standards.

"I don't think it's something to get despondent over. There are police that break rules, doctors that break rules," he said. "It behooves them to police themselves and I believe we do a pretty good job."

Last month a Boston Globe freelancer was found to have fabricated large chunks of a story about a seasonal hunt for baby seals that turned out had not taken place.

In August, a business columnist at the Seattle Times resigned after admitting he copied other journalists' work.

Hoyt said he thought the public was capable of putting the transgressions into perspective.

"Sometimes I think we beat ourselves up a little too frequently," the journalism review editor said. "Human beings are imperfect and journalists are human beings."

The public is sceptical about the credibility of journalists, according to editor Carroll Doherty of The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Doherty said a 2003 Pew survey had shown that 22 per cent of people thought reporters frequently made up stories and 36 per cent believed they did so occasionally.

"A lot of Americans say it goes on there all the time," Doherty said in a telephone interview. "They have a fairly cynical view of the media."

- REUTERS