IF YOU BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ and hear these days, we are living through a sort of journalistic Dark Ages, an era of fabrication, plagiarism, and bias on an epic scale. Examples are everywhere but most prominently in the nation’s leading newspapers. In January Jack Kelley, a star reporter for USA Today, resigned after it was discovered that he had made up parts of eight major stories and stolen material that wasn’t his. Last year a young reporter named Jayson Blair resigned in May from the New York Times for likewise making up or stealing parts of stories for several years. Subsequently, his colleague Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer prize winner, resigned following the disclosure that his byline appeared on stories he didn’t really report in…
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