US newsrooms, more geared toward rooting out scandal than generating it, are emerging from a torrid 12 months that severely dented press credibility and dethroned a brace of high-profile editors.
May 1 marks the first anniversary of the resignation from The New York Times of reporter Jayson Blair, whose exposure as a serial plagiarist and fabricator plunged the newspaper into a crisis that eventually forced out executive editor Howell Raines.
The Blair fiasco, which was accorded blanket coverage because of the Times's reputation, was just one of a string of similar scandals at other prestigious news organisations that triggered a bout of intense soul-searching in the media industry as a whole.
The door had barely swung shut on Blair when another Times journalist - Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Rick Bragg - was forced to quit for his extensive and unattributed use of material from freelance journalists.
Then there was Associated Press reporter Christopher Newton, fired after the news agency found it could not verify the existence of more than 45 people and a dozen organisations cited in 40 articles he had written.
Reporters were not the only ones named and shamed.
In April of last year, The Los Angeles Times sacked a staff photographer working in Iraq for electronically manipulating a picture showing a British soldier directing Iraqi civilians to take cover from a firefight.
Most recently, in March, the biggest-selling US newspaper, USA Today, exposed a former star foreign correspondent as a plagiarist and fabricator in a front-page story.
The paper said Pulitzer Prize nominee Jack Kelley faked major stories, embroidered others with gory details and appeared to lift portions of material from other sources without attribution.
The fallout prompted the resignation last week of USA Today editor Karen Jurgensen.
While some observers categorise the spate of press scandals as an errant annus horribilis, others see it as symptomatic of a deeper cultural malaise at a time when public trust has been battered by corporate fraud on Wall Street and questions over the motives behind the war in Iraq.
"The proper borderline between fiction and reality has never been less visible than it is today in our culture generally," said Mark Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University.
"Here we are living in a time when there's a genre called reality TV, which actually has nothing to do with reality at all," Miller said, adding that journalistic ethics had suffered as a result of so many news entities - radio, print and television alike - being absorbed by media conglomerates.
"The news division is expected to yield as much profit as the entertainment division and (is) subjected to the same ratings pressure," Miller said. "These individual instances of dishonesty and deceptiveness are often just indirect reflections of this fact."
Press scandals, however, are nothing new.
Prior to Blair's exposure, the most notorious case was that of Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for a story about an eight-year-old heroin addict who never existed.
A recent film, "Shattered Glass," refreshed memories of New Republic associate editor Stephen Glass, fired in 1998 for fabricating a series of stories.
"And it goes back way beyond that," said Columbia University journalism professor Richard Wald, who cited the beloved Depression-era American comedian Will Rogers and his catchphrase, "All I know is what I read in the newspapers."
"It always got a big laugh," Wald said. "Why? Because everyone in the audience knew back then that what they read in the papers was nonsense."
Despite the recent scandals, Wald believes journalistic standards are higher now than they were in the bygone days of Joseph Pulitzer or the more recent Watergate era of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
"There was just as much, if not more, chicanery back then as there is now. The difference, of course, is that now more people get caught," Wald said, attributing the exposure of recent plagiarists to the wider dissemination of information via the Internet.
"There are more eyes watching, and that has actually helped force newsrooms to tighten their internal monitoring," he said.
As for levels of trust in the media, a survey carried out last July by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press suggested that the Blair scandal and others had little impact on an already healthily sceptical public.
Fifty-six percent of those surveyed said media stories and reports were often inaccurate, and 62 percent said the press generally tried to cover up its mistakes rather than admit them - both figures virtually unchanged from recent years.
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