Sometimes a newspaper story seems too good to be true. When that happens, a wise editor sends out a backup team to check the details. Several times in recent years, the story turns out to have been a fake. Take the case of Jack Kelley, a 20-year veteran and star reporter for USA Today, the nation’s largest-circulation newspaper.

That newspaper’s internal investigation, supervised by three eminent outside journalists, has determined that Mr. Kelley made up juicy facts, stole incidents and quotes from other newspapers and set traps to mislead the investigators in a rampage of lying and cheating that went on for many years. His worst apparent fraud, which came close to getting him a Pulitzer Prize before the truth came out, was a hyped-up eye-witness account of a suicide bombing in an Israeli pizza shop. He wrote that he saw the bomber before the incident, a young man in a white T-shirt and dark jacket, with a black pouch like a small camera case attached to his waist. When the blast went off, he wrote, “Three men who had been eating pizza inside, were catapulted out of the chairs they had been sitting on. When they hit the ground, their heads separated from their bodies and rolled down the street, [some of them] with their eyes still blinking.”

Other witnesses, rescue workers, and an Israeli National Police spokesman have refuted essential details: There were no decapitations, the bomber carried the explosive in a guitar case rather than a camera case, and Mr. Kelley could not have recognized the bomber by examining his detached head lying on the floor because the head and upper torso remained intact and had been thrown up into a ceiling vent over the pizza ovens. And so on, a series of falsehoods.

What’s to be done? Newspapers are fully aware of the fraud possibilities. Many of them are tightening their assignment and editing functions. Some our routinely double-checking stories that look suspicious. Some give training courses on journalistic ethics. The press, however, is by no means the only American institution afflicted by fraud. Recent instances of lying, cheating, manipulation and coverup have come to light in business, finance, academia, and national and local governments.

Modern information technology, especially computers, make cheating easier now than in an earlier era. The New York Times, for example, had no easy way to learn that Jayson Blair was sitting in his Brooklyn apartment and not in Havana or Bangkok or wherever he pretended to be on a story. Dishonest reporters, like dishonest students or professors, can cut and paste someone else’s work and palm it off as their own. But the high-tech age provides correctives, too. When plagiarism seems likely, a checker who wonders about a cute phrase or sentence can Google it and often find where it was used originally

Vigilance and investigation are necessary, but they are far from sufficient. What’s needed is a renewed emphasis on honesty and trustworthiness and self-respect. The risk of getting caught is one thing. Pride in doing the right thing is something else.