Finger Wagging at the LAT

There is now a bit of ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ after the Tupac/Puffy story the LAT ran was found to be based on bunk documents.

Slate’s Jack Shafer wrote, “Biggie Mistake: How Chuck Philips and the L.A. Times could have dodged the Tupac hoaxer.”

Like most disasters, the Times’ could have been avoided, which is easy for me to say in retrospect.

And E&P’s Joe Strupp writes:

The Los Angeles Times‘ apparent reliance on fabricated FBI records in a story wrongly linking rapper Sean “Puffy” Combs to the shooting of Tupac Shakur has raised new concerns over the use of documents obtained from anonymous sources.

And the blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur by aptly named vet journalist Alan Mutter equates the whole incident with that of a Chicago Tribune intern winning their rival newspapers’ contest about the re-naming of Wrigley Field.

The public trust, an increasingly scarce commodity these days for newspapers, was violated in the cases of both the Tupac story and the Tribune’s stealth video. The only difference between the two cases is that the Los Angeles Times was the victim and the Chicago Tribune was the perpetrator.

We compared it to Dan Rather…but ok…uhm…sure.

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