USA Today said Thursday it has deleted 23 articles from its website after concluding that the reporter who wrote them fabricated sources.
The widely circulated US daily said that after receiving external requests for corrections, it investigated the work of journalist Gabriela Miranda and found that some of the people she quoted were not affiliated with the organizations she said they represented and appeared to be fabricated.
Other quotes she used could not be independently verified, USA Today said.
“As a result, USA TODAY removed 23 articles from its website and other platforms for not meeting our editorial standards,” the newspaper said.
Miranda, who covered “trending news nationwide” according to her website, has resigned from the news organization, it said.
Journalism in the US and elsewhere is rocked periodically by cases of reporters who are caught making up stories or quotes.
Such was the case of Claas Relotius, a star reporter for the German news magazine Der Spiegel, who in 2018 was found to have made up details and quotes in many of his stories.
Jason Blair, a young reporter for The New York Times, resigned in 2003 when the paper found “widespread fabrication and plagiarism” in his work purportedly covering such major events as the US-led war in Iraq.
And Janet Cooke won the Pulitzer prize in 1981 for a story she wrote for The Washington Post but it was later discovered to have been made up and she returned the prize.
