Leaders say former ABC consultant faked interviews.

From Raw Story:


A former consultant for ABC News, Alexis Debat, is under fire for publishing an array of allegedly faked interviews with US and world leaders under his byline in a French magazine.



ABC's blog, The Blotter reports that spokespeople for the subjects of the fabricated interview pieces, which include "Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan," all say the sit-downs never happened.



The interviews were published in the French foreign affairs journal Politique Internationale.



Earlier today in the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz reported that Debat, who worked for ABC until this past June, had admitted to signing off on a fake interview with Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, which appeared in the Summer 2007 edition of the same magazine.



"Today, spokespeople for Pelosi, Bloomberg, Gates, Greenspan and Annan told the Blotter on ABCNews.com that interviews of them under Debat's name in the magazine also never took place," said chief ABC investigative reporter Brian Ross. "In fact," he added, "Stephane Dujarric, the deputy communications director for the U.N. secretary-general, said he called the fabricated interview to the attention of the editor of the magazine, Patrick Wajsman, in June 2005."



"Despite that," Ross writes, "Debat continued for the next two years to be cited as the author of interviews with a range of prominent U.S. public officials in [Politique Internationale]."



Debat previously told the Washington Post his faux Obama piece was written in March by a freelance reporter, who produced a dummy transcript of Obama's "responses" to Debat's questions, which included quotes from the senator saying Iraq was "already a defeat for America" and had "wasted thousands of lives."



"I was scammed," Debat said. "I was very, very stupid. I made a huge mistake in signing that article and not checking [the freelancer's] credentials."