At other times, the pressures of editing on a tight deadline and the fundamental belief that a reporter is telling his editor the truth appeared to work in Mr. Kelley’s favor. —From a New York Times article on the disgrace of USA Today reporter Jack Kelley

Did it indeed? Just imagine that! An editor not only believing but believing fundamentally that a reporter he employs is telling him the truth! Whatever next? Hasn’t The New York Times (or USA Today) ever heard of fact-checkers? Do they think we’re living back in the days when people were used to easy talk about honor and relationships of trust? Nowadays you don’t even get married without signing a pre-nuptial agreement. If you can’t trust your wife or husband, what hope is there of trusting a newspaper reporter? Yet the more one looks at it the more one’s conviction grows that there is no hope but in trust. Put up all the fact-checkers and editorial safeguards you like, there are still just too many ways for a reporter who is determined to deceive you and your readers to get away with it.

That’s why I never considered the Times‘s own little bout of dishonest journalism last year, when young Jayson Blair was found to have falsified several stories over a two- or three-year period, a black mark against the Timesitself. Many as are that newspaper’s faults, in my view, employing Mr. Blair and failing to detect his deceptions