his story is largely about the fate of an American journalist named Jack Kelley, but let me begin with an anecdote, which represents both a necessary preface and an admonishing coda.

In the late 1970s, returning to the United States from Rome with a satchel of largely mediocre clippings in hand, I happened upon an audience at the Philadelphia Inquirer. At the time, the Inquirer was the greyhound of American east coast newspapers. It had an innovative editor, Gene Roberts, and a slew of Pulitzer Prizes to show for its newfound initiative. It was the Inquirer and Newsday, not The New York Times and the Washington Post, that ruled the media day. CNN and USA Today were not born; all-day, all-night television did not exist; the Internet was a government project; the world seemed actually to marry slumber at midnight, or to wish to. Jimmy Carter, an improbably decent (and certainly overtrusting) man, was president. The Iran hostage crisis, that period's aloof-style 9/11, had yet to occur.

On a winter day I found myself in the newsroom of the Inquirer. Newsrooms are not alike. Some tend to the modern, or a vision of the modern, and offer cubicles for their writers and glass partitions for their managers. Others, and the Inquirer seemed to qualify, were glorified barracks, with bodies greasing against one another amid a maze of sullen wooden desks. In this churn I was introduced to the city editor, Jim Naughton.

I do not remember much of Naughton (a former New York Times star) except that he was slim, perhaps in his 30s, and spoke in an alluring southern English whose gentle intonations seemed to ensure kindness. What, said Naughton, whose reporters were fresh from yet another prize, did I think qualified me to work among the esteemed Inquirer Afrika Corps? To this question I had a canned answer in two parts. The first concerned my considerable experience working in Europe as a correspondent (a word I then used without understanding), and the second was my sheaf of clips.

If it's possible to be hugely unimpressed Naughton achieved such a state in my naïve presence. He sat placidly through my foreign correspondent tales (Question: "And who exactly did you speak to get that information?" Answer: "Well, we get our information from these news wires..."), but abruptly drew the line at the clippings, which he pulled from my file. "These are nice," he said, "but, well, I don't know if you ever wrote this. I mean, maybe some editor wrote this. Or maybe you made it up."

To work for his paper, he said, I must spend a week in the streets, reporting. Then, and only then, would he know what to make of me, and of my work. All else, he suggested - fairly sanely when I paused to think about it - was illusory.

USA Today reporter Jack Kelley

The Associated Press

On now, albeit circuitously, to Jack Kelley.

I joined United Press International in 1978, a densely complex year. Leftist terrorists kidnapped and killed prominent German businessman Hanns-Martin Schleyer, then did the same to Italian politician Aldo Moro. Argentina played in and won the World Cup (its fans feigning ignorance of the military junta horrors around them). Three popes reigned in three months. The Islamic revolution overtook Iran (Muslim clerics, their bribes revoked by the Shah, incited revolt), Beirut was awash in Syrian-sponsored violence, Soviet missiles were aimed at the West from the Urals, and a deep recession afflicted Eurocommunist-dominated Europe.

In facing Naughton I believed I had seen my share of stories. Based in Rome, I had been on assignment in Tehran and Istanbul, I had learned Vatican City as only an insider could. I had satisfied some bosses that I could work effectively under deadline pressure. I spoke several languages effectively. Given basic context, I could write 400 words in 10 minutes. I was only 26.

Faced with all this, Jim Naughton denied me a job. He was right to do so.

If I reckon correctly, I first met Jack Kelley when he was about the age I was when I dealt with Naughton, and left disappointed. I joined USA Today in 1986 as an editor-writer, a midlevel rover charged with writing good copy and fixing bad copy in the cover stories department of the newspaper. My chief was Karen Jurgensen, the current editor of USA Today, my mentor was David Mazzarella, who would edit the newspaper in the 1990s, and my "row-mates" were the late Larry Jolidon, a high-octane correspondent, Bill Nichols, who now covers the U.S. State Deparment, and Wanda Lloyd, who has been a managing editor and a Pulitzer juror. (The man I most respected was the editorial page editor, John Seigenthaler, another sweet and brilliant southerner.)

Among my acquaintances at the time was Kelley, whose articles I edited from time to time.

If you don't know Kelley's name, and most of you won't (the American media disseminates its own self-absorption), he falls into a popular category: the anti-Watergate heap of disgraced journalists. The Washington Post's Janet Cooke preceded him; in 1980, she invented a young heroin addict, Jimmy, and her stories won a Pulitzer Prize. It was later returned. More recently, The New York Times' Jayson Blair occupied prime time with wholesale deceptions (revealed by the paper itself) that ultimately led to the resignation of the Times' top editors.

Now there's Kelley, whose foreign work was questioned late last year and has since been revealed (in yet another newspaper mea culpa) as rife with stolen or negligently borrowed material, as well as with outright lies about place and circumstance. In essence, or so the rap sheet goes, Kelley, on the job for more than 15 years, sometimes made up people and events, and even where he was. Although he did not invent the news, he did embellish in a way that crafted wishful-thinking, distortion and possibility into remarkable fact.

This matters to me because I think I have a notion of how Jack Kelley came to be Jack Kelley. And in a media-on-media world, where hurried bias, approximate objectivity and knee-jerk excitement are peddled as can't miss accuracy, I see no reason to resist analyzing the sickness, from which I, too, suffer.

Here in Italy, where I work, where this magazine, The American, is published, fact and surreptitious assumption graze in the same pasture. The conditional is urged into action. The distinction between that which is actually spoken and inferred frequently is blurred for effect. The passionate response to an event is as valuable (and as "truthful") as its more accurate (and possibly duller) circumstances, all the more so among print journalists who battle the pre-eminence of sound bites and images. The fiercely guarded Puritan frontier that separates objective data (biblical literalism) from a personal sense of accuracy (a kind of interpretive theology) does not exist in any country outside the United States, and I include Great Britain. In the non-television American media world the first-person is reviled as a cheap trick - self-aggrandizing, convenient, evidence of unwillingness or an inability to report so-called facts. In the non-America world the first person is common, alluring, seductive, suggestive of shared secrets. In the St. Elsewhere that is not America, where political interests overlap, inference is the rule.

In more than two decades in journalism (I am no grand veteran, merely an observer) I have seen grace and abuse in equal measure. I have seen good reporters pad their work with hearsay from local sources they did not check. I have seen fixers fix for correspondents who were too busy to authenticate sources. I have seen reporters gently conspire to adopt the same ("truthful") view of an event. I have seen enemies share, friends lie, colleagues adorn quotes; I have seen news agency reporters invent stories to recoup losses after another agency's scoop; I have myself, at wit's end, hastily grafted phrasing from better writers and accepted them (in my own mind) as my own, and I have witnessed others do the same. I have known fine correspondents to rely as invalids on work done by news agencies or by research assistants, which is tantamount to accepting a friendly bribe. I dare any English-speaking correspondent who has worked in the field to say they have been wholly original all of the time.

Does this diatribe exonerate Jack Kelley, or anyone else who would knowingly create a demi-world of "perhapsian" and "maybe-esque" phantom figures to please his own, and his editor's, desires? No.

But journalism is a crude, cruel and hyper-competitive business that turns on its own, discards them, and allows plenty little forgiveness in a pinch. Its spasms of moral self-righteousness - "We exist to serve the public; Kelley betrayed the public" - are wholly unconvincing, particularly when reportage and propaganda are sometimes literally embedded.

What, then, happened to 43-year-old Jack Kelley?

He suffers from a pathological disease, say some; he lived a lie, say others. Longtime suspicions were not heeded. Perhaps. But maybe, just maybe, he merely inflated himself into a caricature of what many expected him to be: an edge-maker in a competitive industry, an ace, a seer and a bearer of remarkable, mostly unchecked, information from outland nations few chose to study seriously. Yet Kelley was not the one responsible for doing the checking. That, ultimately, was in the provenance of his confident (if undermanned, undertrained and incurious) dispatchers, who slept when he did not - it is essential to remember that much of what Kelley reported was in fact correct. Confident in the manners of honor (or disbelieving in dishonor), his managers presumed from him unerring American integrity in a world that is largely un-American. They trusted their scribe, unwilling to imagine that even the best one, giddy in the awful playground of the globe, might imagine himself as magician, conjurer, far from home, and eager to make color bleed from stone.

In that way, the Kelley case illustrates an ongoing misunderstanding about the nature of accuracy, which can be rigid in America but relative and open to infinitely illicit variation in "un-factual" lands. Exaggeration is presumed and understood (even incorporated) everywhere but in the seat of wealth and power, where it cannot be admitted until a culprit gives away its abundant existence. In the elsewhere that is not America one man's terrorist can be another's avenging angel; one man's illiterate can be another's visionary; elsewhere, deceit is hip, shrewd , even cool. It has an honest following. It has its own codes of accomplishment and morality.

"Be careful," Jim Naughton said, "if you didn't write it, we'll know it." He was right, and right to verify my bluster, permitting me no ocean's divide behind which to hide. Had he not insisted on imposing basic guidelines, the scandal-sheets would have the name Winner in bronze, ready for pariah status on a planet where - akin to ancient Rome - deceit goes unpunished so long as you're not caught.

- Christopher P. Winner's web column appears on Sunday.

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