The Sept. 28, 1980 Washington Post carried a story simply entitled "Jimmy's World" -- a chilling portrayal of drug addiction and depravity in the modern city.

The story, written by 26-year-old Post reporter Janet Cooke and based on more than 145 pages of handwritten notes, painted a grim portrait of a young black child growing up in Washington, D.C.

		The illustration that accompanied the Sept. 28, 1980 Washington Post story simply entitled "Jimmy's World" -- a chilling portrayal of drug addiction and depravity in the modern city.

"Jimmy is 8 years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms," the article began.

The piece outlined a world in which Jimmy was the product of a brutal rape, lived with his mother in a house overrun by heroin, where death and addiction occupied every room and haunted the boy's life.

"Her description of this, of this child was, was so vivid and the, and the description of the child's mother and the mother's boyfriend, you know, they had names," Bradlee remembered more than a quarter century later. "They were described. There was an illustration to that story that I can still see today, a very haunting drawing of this child."

The story went off like a bomb in Washington, D.C. Police officials said they wanted to find Jimmy and his mother, but the newspaper fought their threat of a subpoena. Mayor Marion Barry publicly questioned whether Jimmy might be a composite of several stories and demanded to know more about the child so he could receive help.

Cooke's story earned rave reviews and in April 1981 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

But it was a fake.

Jimmy, his mother, the abuse, all of it was concocted by Cooke. She would later blame the entire episode on pressure the paper put on its reporter. The entire case unraveled quickly after the award was presented. Profiles of the award-winning journalist soon exposed exaggerations and lies in her biography which led to a closer look at all her reporting.

Within two days, Cooke admitted her fabrication, apologizing "to my newspaper, my profession, the Pulitzer board and all seekers of the truth." She resigned.

But for the Post, the damage was done.

"I believed it, we published it. Official questions had been raised, but we stood by the story and her. Internal questions had been raised, but none about her other work," Donald Graham, Washington Post publisher, told the newspaper two days after the award was announced. "It is a brilliant story -- fake and fraud that it is."

"It is tragedy that someone as talented and promising as Janet Cooke, with everything going for her, felt that she had to falsify the facts," said Bradlee at the time. "The credibility of a newspaper is its most precious asset, and it depends almost entirely on the integrity of its reporters.

		Bradlee still calls the Cooke case "the most serious blow to the Post's reputation while I was there... by far."

When that integrity is questioned and found wanting, the wounds are grievous, and there is nothing to do but come clean with our readers, apologize to the Advisory Board of the Pulitzer Prizes, and begin immediately on the uphill task of regaining our credibility. This we are doing."

For Bradlee, who told Jim Lehrer he still views the episode as "the most serious blow to the Post's reputation while I was ... editor by far," there was only one way to respond once the fraud was uncovered.

"We set for ourselves a simple goal: No one should ever learn anything more about the Janet Cooke case than The Washington Post itself revealed," Bradlee wrote in his 1995 autobiography "A Good Life."

In four days, the ombudsman for the paper, Bill Green, produced a massive 18,000-word story about Cooke, her reporting and the failings of the Post's newsroom.

"The jugular of journalism lay exposed -- the faith an editor has in a reporter," Green concluded.

Michael Getler, who worked for the Post at the time and would later serve as its ombudsman, recalled that the Cooke case had an immediate impact in the way the paper operated.

"One of the things that did happen at the Post is that the star system was diminished," Getler, who now serves as the ombudsman of PBS, told NPR's "On the Media" in 2004. "There was also, I think, an immediate impact on the culture of the newsroom. It was clear that editors had to inquire more frequently about the sources of stories -- that communications generally had to be improved throughout the newsroom -- that had to be a much more open process so that doubts by reporters or junior editors about particular stories could surface."

For Cooke, her disgrace led to life in obscurity. As opposed to journalists such as Jayson Blair of The New York Times and Stephen Glass of the New Republic, who capitalized on their notoriety by writing books, Cooke faded quickly from public view. A 1996 GQ article written by her former boyfriend and Washington Post colleague Mike Sager said Cooke was working for minimum wage at a retail store in Michigan.

The article renewed interest in the Cooke case and landed Sager and Cooke a movie deal that netted the two $1.6 million, but the film was never made and she soon receded again from public view.

The case continues to haunt Bradlee.

"Janet Cooke is a beautiful black woman with a dramatic flair and vitality, and an extraordinary talent for writing," Bradlee opens the chapter in his autobiography about the ordeal. "She is also a cross that journalism, especially The Washington Post, and especially Benjamin C. Bradlee, will bear forever."

-- Compiled by Lee Banville for the Online NewsHour