She invented sources and quotes: a journalist from the American national daily USA Today resigned. The newspaper withdrew twenty articles from its site, expressing its “regrets” on Thursday and reaffirming its editorial and ethical principles.
It was after receiving a request for correction of an article that USA Today launched an “audit on the work of reporter Gabriela Miranda”, one of its journalists, according to a press release published on its site. This internal investigation “revealed that certain individuals cited were not linked to the organizations invoked and seemed invented”, denounced the press organ.
23 articles removed from the site
USA Today also realized that “quotes from other people could not be independently verified and that some articles contained quotes that should have been attributed to others”. As a result, the newspaper removed 23 articles from its site and other platforms because they “do not meet (its) editorial criteria”.
The newspaper assured “to do (its) best to be precise and factual in all (its) content” and said “to regret this situation”. “We will continue to strengthen our principles and processes for reporting and editing” information, the newspaper pledged by publishing some basic journalistic rules such as verifying sources and facts.
The American press in crisis
The titles of the offending papers also appear on the site and the journalist “resigned from her post as a reporter” for the newspaper and the network USA Today, owned by the Gannett group, the number one local press in the United States. Gannett had been acquired in November 2019 for around $1.2 billion by another American media group, New Media Investment Group, to form a juggernaut of more than 250 different publications.
Once flourishing and extremely diverse, the regional and local daily press in the United States has suffered terribly from successive crises, in particular the Covid-19 pandemic. In the 2010s, cases of plagiarism and bogus also splashed newspapers as prestigious as the Washington Post and the New York Times, and resulted in the departure of the offending journalists.
Source: 20minutes
I, Ronald Payne, am a journalist and author who dedicated his life to telling the stories that need to be said. I have over 7 years of experience as a reporter and editor, covering everything from politics to business to crime.
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