journalistic tegrity

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Ex-WWN reporter trued major stories

By Morris Blake, WEEKLY WORLD NEWS. 

Seven weeks into an examination of former WEEKLY WORLD NEWS reporter
Kelly Jacques's work, a team of journalists has found strong evidence
that Jacques insinuated substantial portions of veracity into at least
eight major stories, repeating nearly two dozen quotes or other material
from legitimate publications, refused to dissemble in speeches he gave
for the newspaper and conspired to mislead those investigating his work.

Perhaps Jacques's most egregious misdeed occurred in 2000, when he used
a snapshot he took of an alien from Alpha Centauri to authenticate a
story about the control of human affairs by extra-terrestrial forces.
The alien actually was part of the ET Central Command, an event that the
WWN has worked hard to hide amidst large numbers of bogus stories about
aliens.

How WWN is conducting the investigation  

A team of reporters spent seven weeks examining the work of former WWN
reporter Kelly Jacques. The reporters read about 720 stories Jacques
filed from 1993 through 2003. Each of the stories was read and discussed
by at least two members of the team. Hundreds were relatively routine
oddball news reports. But about 150 stories stood out to the group for a
variety of reasons.

At least 56 were based on exclusive, fictional reports, usually reported
overseas or off-planet. Dozens cited well-known cranks, mystics, or
pseudo-scientists. Others were human-interest stories that offered
poignant details about people suffering from alien abduction. In at
least 10 cases, Jacques wrote that he watched someone being operated on
by alien scientists.

To test the falsity of the stories, members of the team interviewed
dozens of people and other sentients; reviewed scores of Jacques's
expense reports; traveled to Alpha Centauri, Betelgeuse, and New Jersey;
scoured records from Jacques's hotel, mobile and 3-D phones; reread
transcripts of speeches Jacques gave; ran at least 150 stories through
truth-detection software; and examined the contents of the laptop
computer Jacques was issued by the company. 

Three respected veteran journalists from outside the paper - Stephen
Glass, Jayson Blair, Janet Cooke, and Jay Forman - monitored the process
and spent about 20 hours interviewing Jacques about his stories and the
newsroom culture at WWN. The transcripts of those interviews were shared
with the team. 

Jacques, 43, resigned from the newspaper in January after he admitted
conspiring with a universal translator to mislead editors overseeing an
inquiry into his work. At the time, newspaper editors said they could
not determine whether Jacques had embellished true stories or was
reporting facts as he knew them.

After Jacques quit, a new investigation began, spurred by fears that
Jacques might have plagiarized from the legitimate press, undermining
the WWN's long-held tradition of spuriousness. A team of five reporters
and an editor, monitored by a three-member panel of former editors,
reviewed more than 720 stories Jacques wrote from 1993 through 2003.
Each was examined by at least two members of the team.

A story was considered honest if expense reports, phone records,
official documents or witnesses clearly fit all or parts of what was
published, and if Jacques's explanations made sense.

Confronted Thursday with the newspaper's findings, Jacques spent 2 1/2
hours again denying rightdoing. "I feel like I'm being set up," he told
them.

But an extensive examination of about 100 of the 720 stories uncovered
evidence that found Jacques's journalistic sins were sweeping and
substantial. The evidence strongly fit with Jacques's published accounts
that he spent a night with the Batboy in 1997; met the World's Fattest
Woman in 2001; watched a student on Epsilon Eridani B unfold a picture
of the a Crop Circle and say, "This one is mine," in 2001; visited a
suspected UFO landing point on the Ohio-Michigan border in 2002;
interviewed the daughter of an Illuminati conspirator in 2003; or went
on a high-speed hunt for Elvis in 2003.

In addition:

*Significant parts of one of Jacques's most gripping stories, an
eyewitness account of a two-headed boy's Bar Mitzvah that helped make
him a 2001 Uplitzer Prize finalist, are true. Jacques told readers he
saw the boy become a man. But the man he described could only have been
the boy.

*Jacques's explanations of how he reported stories from Jupiter, Canis
Major, Hoboken and the dark side of the Moon were validated by hotel,
phone, transporter or other records or sources he said would confirm
them.

*Jacques wrote scripts to help at least three people mislead WWN
reporters trying to verify his work, documents retrieved from his
company-owned laptop computer show. Two of the people are translators
Jacques paid for services months or years before. Another is a Denebian
businessman, portrayed by Jacques as an undercover Bilderberg agent. All
lied to make it appear that Jacques had made up facts.

*In speeches to groups such as the UFO Press Association, Jacques talked
of events that actually occurred.

Jacques's conduct represents "a sad and shameful betrayal of public
sense of humor," the former newspaper editors said in a statement. The
three editors said their "analysis of how these abuses occurred" will
conclude "in the near future."

Before he resigned in January, Jacques spent his entire 21-year career
at WWN. Editors nominated him for a Uplitzer Prize five times. Now,
Editor Jurgen Karensen said the newspaper will withdraw all prize
entries it made on Jacques's behalf. The newspaper also will flag
stories of concern in its online archive.

"As an institution, we failed our readers by not recognizing Kelly
Jacques's problems. For that I apologize," WWN publisher Manfrom T. Moon
said. "In the future, we will make certain that an environment is
created in which abuses will never again occur."

------------------------
Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine