Coming clean.

Byline: The Register-Guard

How are readers responding to these depressingly regular - 10 in the past 10 months - revelations of plagiarism or outright fabrication at newspapers large and small across America? The cynical answer is: With a shrug. More than half of the public surveyed recently believes such ethical lapses happen either frequently (22 percent) or occasionally (36 percent) at newspapers.

But for those who haven't already written off reporters as unprincipled scoundrels, there should be something reassuring in newspapers' willingness to vigorously wash their dirtiest laundry in public.

The most recent scandal, involving USA Today's former star foreign correspondent Jack Kelley, is a case in point. After internal questions arose, eight USA Today staff members spent seven weeks examining more than 700 of Kelley's articles going back more than 10 years. Members of the team interviewed dozens of people; reviewed Kelley's expense reports; traveled to Cuba, Israel and Jordan; scoured records from Kelley's hotel, mobile and office phones; reread transcripts of speeches Kelley gave; ran at least 150 stories through plagiarism-detection software; and examined the contents of the laptop computer Kelley was issued by the company.

Three nationally renowned former newspaper editors were brought in to supervise the investigation, which culminated in a two-page spread in the newspaper. Among the findings:

Significant parts of one of Kelley's most famous stories, an eyewitness account of a suicide bombing in Israel, were untrue. The story was part of a portfolio that made Kelley a 2001 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Kelley wrote scripts to help at least three people mislead the USA Today team that was trying to verify his work.

Kelley's explanations of how he reported stories from Egypt, Russia, Kosovo, Israel and elsewhere did not jibe with hotel, telephone or other records he said would confirm his account.

Kelley, 43, quit the nation's largest-circulation newspaper in January after admitting he conspired with a translator to mislead editors. He denied ever fabricating or plagiarizing information.

Kelley joins a rogue's gallery of infamous newspaper prevaricators that includes the disgraced Jayson Blair, whose fabrications at The New York Times prompted an even larger investigation and ultimately claimed the jobs of the newspaper's top two editors last May.

Such scrupulous, voluntary public disclosure of embarrassing misconduct doesn't happen in many professions (quick, name one). The fact that it does happen on the relatively rare occasions when the product of a professional journalist fails the test of truthfulness represents a serious commitment to readers:

Credibility is a newspaper's most important asset. To protect it, newspapers will forthrightly acknowledge their mistakes and will demonstrate to readers the steps being taken to correct conditions that may have contributed to the problem.

That said, newspapers must remember that readers' assessments of credibility will always depend more on the quality of the reporting they find throughout the newspaper each day than on the responses to high-profile scandals that make front-page headlines.