How did the Los Angeles Times not realize it was being duped during its six-month investigation into the shooting of Tupac Shakur?
The paper has apologized for relying on forged documents in reporting a story about a 1994 attack on Shakur. The Times story took months of reporting and preparation; The Smoking Gun took roughly a week to reveal its fatal flaws.
Clearly, something went terribly wrong at the paper, and those involved have apologized:
Reporter Chuck Philips and his supervisor, Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin, issued statements of apology Wednesday afternoon. The statements came after The Times took withering criticism for the Shakur article, which appeared on latimes.com last week and two days later in the paper’s Calendar section…
“In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job,” Philips said in a statement Wednesday. “I’m sorry.”
In his statement, Duvoisin added: “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.”
Times Editor Russ Stanton announced that the newspaper would launch an internal review of the documents and the reporting surrounding the story. Stanton said he took the criticisms of the March 17 report “very seriously.”
“We published this story with the sincere belief that the documents were genuine, but our good intentions are beside the point,” Stanton said in a statement.
“The bottom line is that the documents we relied on should not have been used. We apologize both to our readers and to those referenced in the documents and, as a result, in the story. We are continuing to investigate this matter and will fulfill our journalistic responsibility for critical self-examination.”
Some critics are surprised by the paper’s inability to instantly determine what went wrong. But it would be more surprising if the Times could suddenly point to one fatal flaw. That would mean the paper didn’t have the necessary faith in the documents required to publish a potentially defamatory story. It would mean they published with doubts in their minds. Clearly, the Times believed it had the goods. Perhaps more importantly, it wanted to have the goods. Like Dan Rather wanted to have the goods on President George Bush’s National Guard record.
In the end, the Times staffers involved were satisfied that the purported FBI documents were legitimate. This was likely the result of a process during which they tried to check themselves (”What if we’re wrong?”). But they also had a desire to not have wasted their time (”What if we’re right?!”). They wanted the documents, the scoop, to be real. This form of confirmation bias is the bane of every journalist, and a boon to unreliable sources and hoaxsters. They know we want it; it’s just a matter of setting the right trap.
Everything that comes after the moment of mental confirmation will only serve to further confirm the accepted truth. It’s easy to make things fit a point of view once you’ve convinced yourself that it’s accurate.
I’m sure Philips and Duvoisin are shocked at how wrong the story was. Assuming the paper does a proper examination, they’ll probably see a pattern emerge: an assemblage of assumptions, confirmation bias, and misinterpretations mixed with, I’m guessing, a little bit of bad luck and unintentional sloppiness thrown in for good measure.
In hindsight, some mistakes will seem obvious. Maybe people will deem them to be stupid mistakes. Hopefully, these mistakes, stupid and otherwise, will serve to inform new policies and procedures. Moving on without addressing them only guarantees repetition.
This incident is an interesting contrast. At some point along the way, the Times decided: this looks legit. Then The Smoking Gun looked at the same set of facts and documents and said: this looks bogus.
It was a binary problem and TSG solved it.
