BOB GARFIELD: In January, prompted by an anonymous letter from a colleague, editors at USA Today launched an investigation into the work of star reporter Jack Kelley. Kelley resigned shortly thereafter, caught in a cover-up of his fabricated stories. Since then, USA Today has assigned five reporters, one editor and a three-member panel of former editors from outside the paper to scrutinize Kelley's work for embellishments, fabrications and plagiarism. When the news of the Kelley investigation first broke, at this program there was a gasp, followed by a shrug. The gasp, because I've known Jack for 22 years, and the resigned shrug because, okay, another reporter undone by his own hubris, another reason for the public to distrust the press. But as the details have started to emerge as to just what Kelley's lies amounted to, that shrug has turned into a shiver. John Gorenfeld is a contributing writer to Salon magazine, and he joins me now. John, welcome to the show.

JOHN GORENFELD: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: There's a line from a Kelley article that you used to open your piece, and it begins with this couple of sentences: "A Jewish settler named Avi Shapiro vows to eliminate the, quote, 'sons of Arab whores.' He dons his yarmulke, and along with 12 vigilantes, riddles a Palestinian taxi with bullets." What became of that made-up story?

JOHN GORENFELD: Well, there was a huge outcry from the Jewish community. They had their own suspicions at the beginning that it was a fabrication. They thought it was ridiculous that these very religious Jews would don their skull caps like they were putting on cowboy hats on the way out for a mission, when in reality, a very religious orthodox Jew would probably have a skull cap on all the time. Likewise, there were people ranging from occupation critics to outright Nazi sympathizers who eagerly seized on the stereotype that Jack Kelley had drawn of this sinister, coldblooded, Arab-hating Jewish settler, Avi Shapiro, from Brooklyn, and there were letter-writing campaigns, even by -- I found one by a Holocaust denial site -- this extremist organization that wanted to make sure that its members congratulated Jack Kelley on his "courage in breaking with the mainstream press and covering this evil being" in a way that they felt was balanced.

BOB GARFIELD: By the same token, he wrote a similarly demonizing story about a young Pakistani boy, didn't he?

JOHN GORENFELD:And this story, Jack Kelley claims that he met a group of young men who said "America, hear this -- we will get your children - we will get their playgrounds," and at the end of the story he has this incredible, improbable kicker -- one of the students unrolls a photograph of the Sears Tower and says "This one's mine." After it ran in the paper, it really shows up everywhere, and it was cited twice by Tim Russert of Meet the Press. He ran it by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He wanted to know what does this say, basically, about the people that we're up against? There was even a Jonah Goldberg column in National Review on line saying if we're dealing with people like this, then capturing their hearts and minds, he said, only makes sense if it means capturing them and putting them into mason jars.

BOB GARFIELD: These fictions are quite incendiary, and they have consequences in the real world.

JOHN GORENFELD:One of the most interesting cases, and this is from a story that hasn't been fingered specifically yet by the USA Today investigation as untrue, although it's certainly questionable -- Jack Kelley's eyewitness testimony entered upon a longstanding debate between Israelis and Palestinians over whether Palestinians were abusing Arab ambulances to fight back against Israeli soldiers. Now, Jack Kelley claims that he not only saw an Arab Red Crescent ambulance pull up and unload supplies for Molotov cocktails; he also says that he watched the driver get out and begin firing at Israeli soldiers before hopping back in his ambulance and driving off. And this eyewitness testimony from Jack Kelley has been quoted all over the place. There's even a quote from it on the website of the Israeli Embassy, and a U.S. Congressman followed up on it in condemning the Red Crescent. Now for all we know, the story of Palestinians misusing ambulances may be entirely true. The trouble is, Jack Kelley's testimony is very pivotal in establishing this, and-- who knows how much effect it may have had on the Israeli policy of detaining ambulances on their way into areas like the West Bank.

BOB GARFIELD:One of the big questions rolling around the Jack Kelley scandal has been it's, it's so improbable that one reporter could be at the right place at the right time to run into all of this human drama. How could his fabrications not have been discovered by USA Today's editors long ere this? And, in your piece, you get to one of the answers, and this is maybe one of the most troubling aspects of this whole story -- it's because Kelly, fundamentally was dealing in, in stereotypes.

JOHN GORENFELD: I think they were stereotypes that people on both sides of the Mid-East crisis and people in America during the buildup to the Afghanistan war were very eager to hear, about - the most ironic part, I've found, about this whole thing was that for so many people on, on both sides who ate up his caricatures of bloodthirsty Arabs and bloodthirsty Jews -- in their minds, this was balanced journalism. It confirmed their pre-existing stereotypes of how wretched and inhuman the side that they didn't like was.

BOB GARFIELD: But what does this episode tell you about the stakes of journalistic fraud?

JOHN GORENFELD:I think this tells us that the stakes can be life or death. So far, much of the coverage I've seen of the Jack Kelley scandal has put the onus on his editors. It's very much been an inside-baseball sort of look at what's wrong with journalistic editorial practices, almost a human resource issue. I think it's much more serious. It really gets at how people like this shape visions of reality, and it, it really, for me, defines the line between a kind of journalism that is really just going to not require people to think or question their assumptions, and the kind that works in shades of gray and looks at ambiguities. I think Jack Kelley's fabrications certainly were designed, not to change people's minds, but to re-assure them of what they already felt about certain groups of people.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, John, thank you very much.

JOHN GORENFELD: It's a pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD: John Gorenfeld is a contributing writer to Salon magazine.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, why it's too soon to trust the Iraqi press; another reason to distrust polls; and a trusted voice leaves his post. [CLIP PLAYS]

BOB EDWARDS: "It's 19 minutes past the hour."

BOB GARFIELD: It's also On the Media, from NPR.