Oh God, this is enough to send shattering chills down any journalist's spine:
The Los Angeles Times has acknowledged that it unwittingly relied on fabricated FBI documents, created by a con man, for a report that implicated associates of rap mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs in the 1994 shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur.The story's author, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chuck Philips, said in a statement late yesterday: "In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job. I'm sorry." Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin also apologized, saying in a separate statement: "We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck's. I deeply regret that we let our readers down."
But what's particularly interesting is how they were fooled--and how the hoax was caught.
The embarrassing admission came hours after a report by the Smoking Gun. The Web site, which specializes in law-enforcement records, said the Times "appears to have been hoaxed" by "an accomplished document forger" in its story last week tying Combs's associates to the non-fatal shooting of Shakur 12 years ago. .William Bastone, the Smoking Gun's editor, said he immediately "thought something smelled" after looking at the FBI documents posted on the paper's Web site -- particularly the fact that they appeared to originate from a typewriter, although the bureau's agents switched to computers about 30 years ago.
The humiliation for the Times is reminiscent of the black eye that CBS received for using what the network presented as National Guard records in Dan Rather's 2004 report on President Bush's military service.
I can't help but wonder if they weren't rooked by the Dan Rather fallout--if they didn't assume that a document which looked like it was typewritten was therefore more likely to be authentic.
Seems like some other numbers would be helpful for some context:
I wonder how long before someone writes "fake but accurate"?
In fairness, I work for a company that was only founded in the early 1990s, and periodically when I have to reference something from the older sections of the archives, I do find a lot of typewritten documents. This is particularly the case when any sort of preprinted form had to be filled out, something that occurred frequently in the days before editable .DOC and .PDF forms became popular.
Anyone experienced with studying procedural forms and records would spot the discrepancy immediately, as apparently happened when The Smoking Gun looked at the evidence, but without further evidence, I would expect the LAT could be forgiven for being fooled on first glance, although obviously the second glance should have been conducted by someone with a bit more expertise in the field.
This kind of thing is why I laugh when newspapers claim that bloggers are unreliable because they don't have the many layers of fact checks and editorial controls that the newspapers have. It seems that bloggers ARE the fact checkers for the main stream media. Sad.
This is also why I'd rather know the political and other affiliations of reporters. They ARE biased and their biases DO affect their reporting. I'd like to at least know what their iases are so I can compensate.
The photographs of the stick-figure drawings of Combs plotting the shooting with his co-conspirators should have alerted the LA Times that something wasn't kosher.
This seems to be a non-political crime or show business story. So, what does the reporter's political bias have to do with it?
This kind of thing is why I laugh when newspapers claim that bloggers are unreliable because they don't have the many layers of fact checks and editorial controls that the newspapers have. It seems that bloggers ARE the fact checkers for the main stream media. Sad.
This is also why I'd rather know the political and other affiliations of reporters. They ARE biased and their biases DO affect their reporting. I'd like to at least know what their biases are so I can compensate.
Posted by Earnest Iconoclast | March 27, 2008 12:39 PM
EI,
Toto never gets enough play..
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032138/quotes
This is the same LA Times that published a hoax about Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte a couple of years ago because a "source" told them that a sealed affidavit said something it didn't actually say.