Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize for a story about a child heroin addict she fabricated.
In 1921, New York World reporter Louis Seibold won a Pulitzer Prize for an interview he conducted with President Woodrow Wilson. The problem: Wilson was incapacitated due to a stroke, and the interview was faked with the help of the president’s wife and chief of staff.
Now known for his frequent presence on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Barnicle was forced to resign from the Boston Globe in 1998 after plagiarizing the comedian George Carlin in a column. Barnicle had troubles dating back to 1973, when a court ruled Barnicle made up a quote and the Globe was forced to pay $40,000 in damages. In 1990, he quoted Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz as saying he likes Asian women because they’re “submissive.” The Globe paid $75,000 in a settlement after Dershowitz sued.
In 2004, Fox News apologized to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) after Cameron falsely reported Kerry had received a manicure before a presidential debate. Cameron wrote a story posted to Fox’s website with made-up quotes from Kerry. “I’m metrosexual — he’s a cowboy!” the senator “said” in the story.
Blair resigned from The New York Times in 2002 after it was discovered he had lifted material from other papers, invented scenes and filed stories from places he had never been. Dozens of Blair’s stories contained such problems, including reports about the Washington sniper shootings and wounded Iraq war veterans.
Kelly, a foreign correspondent and Pulitzer finalist, resigned from USA TODAY in 2004 after he was caught working with a translator to mislead his editors. The paper’s investigation of his work found at least eight of his major stories to be false, including an account of a “high speed hunt” for Osama bin Laden in 2003.
Cooke won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1981 for her Washington Post profile of an 8-year-old heroin addict, “Jimmy’s World.” Jimmy turned out not to exist (although then-D.C. Mayor Marion Barry claimed to have located the child). Cooke admitted making up the story after editors at the Toledo Blade — where Cooke had previously worked — noticed she had inflated her resume.
Smith, a Boston Globe metro columnist like Barnicle, resigned two months before her co-worker after an editor caught her creating characters in her columns. Smith, who doubles as a spoken-word poet, admitted that four of her columns contained fictional elements and resigned.