Janet Cooke (born 1958) is a US reporter who worked for the Washington Post and gained notoriety in the field of journalism for fabricating a news story that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Janet Cooke joined the staff of Washington Post in 1980. According to her diplomas, she had graduated from Vassar College, attended Sorbonne University and had received an award for her job at The Toledo Blade . She began to work at the weeklies section of the paper under editor Vivian Aplin-Brownlee but later expanded to other stories.

In an article called "Jimmy's World ", Cooke wrote a gripping profile of a boy called Jimmy, an eight-year-old heroin addict; her mother let her live-in-boyfriend inject the drug into her son. Cooke used false names in order to, she said, protect the identity of her sources. The article appeared in the Washington Post of September 29 1980.

The story aroused a lot of sympathy among readers, and Marion Barry, mayor of Washington DC, told police to find the poor boy. They could not find him and Barry later announced that the story was fraudulent.

Eventually Cooke's coworkers begun to have their own suspicions as well. When Cooke offered a story of a 14-year-old prostitute to an editor Milt Coleman, he demanded her to reveal real names or he would not publish the story. She could not.

Regardless, Washington Post nominated the story for the Pulitzer Prize, and it was awarded April 13 1981.

When the editors of the Toledo Blade, where Cooke had previously worked, read her biographical notes, they noticed a number of discrepancies. Further investigation revealed that Cooke had never graduated from Vassar; her only academic degree was a bachelor's degree from the University of Toledo. When editors of the Washington Post pressured her, she broke down and confessed. She later claimed that Jimmy was a composite character based on street rumors about similar people. When she had failed to find anyone specific, she had made the boy up.

Two days after the prize had been awarded, Washington Post publisher Donald E. Graham held a press conference and admitted that the story was fraudulent. The editorial of the next day's paper apologized.

Cooke resigned, the prize was returned and the reputation of the venerable Washington Post was sullied for years. Cooke married a Washington lawyer but the marriage failed. As of 1996, Janet Cooke was working as a retail clerk in a clothing store in Kalamazoo, Michigan.