The USA Today report on disgraced ex-reporter Jack Kelley is out, and boy, does it paint the newspaper as a grim place to work…

One reporter, whose instinctive reaction to a Kelley exclusive would have kept it out of the paper had she been an editor, described the reason she did not challenge it earlier: “The culture tells you every day that you give your superior whatever he or she wants in order to look good.” Another explained it this way: “I was told not to tell my editors because, “They’ll knock your head off.”

Some staff members called the News department “the House of Mean.”

One foreign correspondent expressed his doubts about Kelley’s reporting from the Balkans to a Circulation department manager, but never mentioned it to news executives. In the Washington Bureau where some reporters say they work beyond a climate of fear, one senior member still describes the culture as one in which, “People have their marching orders. If you don’t follow them to the letter, there’s not room for discussion. It’s an atmosphere where everyone plays it very, very tight. People follow orders’or else!�

One News editor, explaining to a colleague why a reporter�s complaint was not reported up the line, said, “My job is to think just like [my boss] so he knows I’m never second-guessing him.”

In this story, USA Today details a few more of Kelley’s unbelievable concotions:
“In Yugoslavia in 1999, for instance, a refugee takes time to speak to Kelley even while the refugee believes dogs are trying to eat the body of his dead son.” In a 1992 report from Somalia, Kelley plagarized an AP article that quoted humanitarian worker Annalena Tonelli.

In the Associated Press version, Tonelli spoke the words while “holding a frail child with glazed eyes and a runny nose.” In Kelley’s version, she spoke “while running from machine-gun fire with a crying child in each arm.”

Oy vey…