The cases of Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass confirm that men are particularly good at passing off fiction as fact, literally making up what is supposed to be news. Glass composed his tales for The New Republic and Blair for the venerable New York Times, giving us yet another good reason why that publication should not be the newspaper of record anywhere except New York.

Both cases garnered ample publicity but readers should not get the idea that men completely dominate the field. As a new case shows, women are striving to catch up, and this certainly deserves the same scrutiny that men receive. Consider the case of Diana Griego Erwin, who won a Pulitzer Prize for public service for her work on a project at the Denver Post.

She went on to win a George Polk award and, in 1990, a prize for commentary from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. In 1993, Griego Erwin moved to the Sacramento Bee, the only daily in California's capital. The Bee paid her a lot of money to write a human interest column three times a week in the paper's metro section. Diana Griego Erwin hit her stride and became something of a local institution, with a following.

Her stories tended to follow the headlines rather closely, and featured locals who overcame significant difficulties. Readers understood that these were real people, not fictional characters. The trouble was, more than a few of her characters suffered from existential problems.

Griego Erwin escaped scrutiny until April of this year, when an editor asked her to provide the name of the establishment where she had supposedly interviewed the previous night a bartender named Anthony Romero. It was a simple and not very demanding request but the Pulitzer-winning journalist couldn't recall the information at first. Later she came up with a name, but no Anthony Romero worked at the location she gave. The Bee then began taking a harder look at Griego Erwin's columns.

She was unable to verify a number of details in recent work, including contact information for people she claimed to have interviewed in their own homes. Griego Erwin could, however, read the writing on the wall. She resigned from the paper on May 11, denying that she had done anything wrong, or that she had fabricated anything, and calling the investigation of her work a "witch hunt."

The Bee launched a deeper investigation and found 43 people who could not be verified. Unlike Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse, Griego Erwin was not good at making up believable names. Her subjects included Carrie Escarta, whose surname, investigators found, did not exist anywhere in California or the nation. Neither did Victor Budriyev, supposedly a Russian immigrant who had lost track of his girlfriend in Los Angeles. Property records, voter rolls, telephone books, and powerful search engines failed to turn up many others.

Griego Erwin may have believed that being a woman gave her special protection. It didn't and shouldn't. Lapses in editorial oversight can easily lead to scandal, regardless of gender. A broader lesson is that prestigious awards do not guarantee lifetime accuracy.

Women who want to be columnists should stick to the facts, often stranger than anything anyone can invent. Stephen Glass, for example, went on to write a book, Broken Glass. If Diana Griego Erwin fails to parlay her journalistic fraud into a book deal, maybe one could say that a double standard remains.

Sally Pipes is President and CEO at the California-based Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.