L.A. Times Apologizes for Rapper Story

[flashl]

Source: Washington Post

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."

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.

Washington Post

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/27/AR2008032700879.html?hpid=topnews

[xchrom]

1. this just underscores the pathetic state of main stream journalism today.

that was an amateurish mistake -- taken to extraoridinary levels.

[efhmc]

2. Someone actually investigated this is the amazing part.

[SteinbachMB]

3. Dan Rather

If one messes up a story on TV, it's a lot more embarrassing. Where is Rather now?

[Wickerman]

5. Sadly, Rather's info was not incorrect, the RW spin machine

pounced quickly and changed the topic. Since the voracity of the docs couldn't be established, the whole issue of Bush being a deserter was swept under the rug and Rather took the fall. Ironic, isn't it? A joke of a pResident takes us to war based on some forged documents and dubious intelligence and he gets re-"elected." A man offers up some docs on the evening news that should've been better vetted but are essentially correct and he loses his job and the facts be damned.

Is this a great country to have powerful friends, or what?

[selador]

6. oh for petes sake

the rather documents were obviously forged, as apparently so were these in this case

rather (was) a great journalist but the AWOL bush thang was an atrocity of little to no fact checking.

his (and mapes et al) sloppy reportage and fact checking ended up HELPING bush.

by NOT getting the story right and relying (without looking into it) on a forged document rather succeeded in making bush look like a VICTIM (which, in a sense he was).

it's frigging ironic as hell, and rather gets no respect from me.

we see this all the time, across the political spectrum (and even in non-political stories like jayson blair, etc.) that when people want to believe something, they turn the blinders on.

sorry. rather screwed the p00ch.

bush's embarassing "military" record took a distant second in the public's eyes because rather et al managed to completely bungle an investigation and rely on bogus doc's that they SHOULD have vetted but didn't.

i recall at the time there was a fair bit of suspicion that the forged documents actually might have had provenance from a really devious right winger to do a "gotcha" on CBS.

[struggle4progress]

8. Since Rather's lawsuit hasn't been summarily dismissed, your "facts" are at least questionable

At least three separate and independent media reports, of which the CBS story was only one, all appeared at the same time, all relying on different evidence and all reaching essentially the same conclusion regarding Bush's NG "service": the rightwing attack on CBS/Rather diverted attention from the other two

[selador]

9. yer missing the issue

the point is NOT about bush's national guard service (record of which is spotty, and frankly kind of laughable)

the ISSUE was relying on bogus documents, in an attempt to prove it.

as for the case of rather's lawsuit, that's not the point either. read the lawsuit

http://www.aolcdn.com/tmz_documents/0919_don_rather_wm_01.pdf

his claims have little to do with the document itself, but more in relation to how he was treated (publically and privately) by CBS.

most people have not read the lawsuit ime who opine on it. tpyical.


hypothetical: assume for the sake of argument that there is a REAL document that has the EXACT same text as the forged document. iow, the metanarrative is 100% true.

it's still irrelevant to my point. you don't rely on bogus evidence (especially whne it is clearly bogus if you did BASIC vetting) to prove a true story.

even if the underlying story is true, the fact that you "proved" it by relying on crap evidence turns the subject of an investigation into a martyr of sort,etc.

i keep repeating this, but people fail to get it. the issue was the reliance on bogus documents and the unwillingness to check their veracity.

that's the issue.

[struggle4progress]

17. Dan Rather is right (MediaMatters Sept 07)

by Eric Boehlert

The story was true -- Dan Rather, September 20

... right-wing bloggers .. punched their TV sets in frustration watching Rather go on national television and claim, correctly, that nobody has ever proven that the memos he used in his report were fake, and pointing out that the basic facts of the Texas Air National Guard story -- that Bush walked away from his military commitment during the Vietnam War for months at a time--are still not in dispute.

After all, for lots of Bush bloggers, two absolute truths that must never be questioned in public are that the CBS memos were proven forgeries (they weren't), and that the whole Bush-skipped-out-on-his-National-Guard-duty story was bogus (it wasn't) ...

Rather is also correct in his claim that amidst the so-called Memogate scandal, nervous CBS executives capitulated in order to "pacify the White House," "appease angry government officials," and "curry favor with the Bush administration."

For instance, there was CBS' shameful decision in September 2004 not to run a previously scheduled, and factually solid, story done by the late Ed Bradley that chronicled how the Bush administration had misled the country into war. Bradley's in-depth investigation, had it aired in 2004, would have been the first by a major network news outlet to devote serious time and energy to investigating the baffling case of the forged Niger documents that were used as a pivotal propaganda tool in the administration's push for war ...

http://mediamatters.org/columns/200709250005

[struggle4progress]

18. The Flawed Report on Dan Rather (NY Review of Books Apr 2005)

Volume 52, Number 6 · April 7, 2005
The Flawed Report on Dan Rather
By James C. Goodale

... A few weeks ago .. Richard Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi .. released their report on Dan Rather's use of allegedly forged Texas Air National Guard (ANG) documents covering .. George W. Bush's military service. The report .... is .. flawed report ... It should not be uncritically accepted ...

Surprisingly, the panel was unable to conclude whether the documents are forgeries or not. If the documents are not forgeries, what is the reason for the report? The answer is: to criticize the newsgathering practices of CBS ...

Lost in the commotion over the authenticity of the documents is that the underlying facts of Rather's 60 Minutes report are substantially true ...

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17871

[struggle4progress]

19. Authenticity backed on Bush documents (Boston Globe Sep 2004)

By Francie Latour and Michael Rezendes, Globe Staff
September 11, 2004

After CBS News on Wednesday trumpeted newly discovered documents that referred to a 1973 effort to ''sugar coat" President Bush's service record in the Texas Air National Guard, the network almost immediately faced charges that the documents were forgeries, with typography that was not available on typewriters used at that time.

But specialists interviewed by the Globe and some other news organizations say the specialized characters used in the documents, and the type format, were common to electric typewriters in wide use in the early 1970s, when Bush was a first lieutenant.

Philip D. Bouffard, a forensic document examiner in Ohio who has analyzed typewritten samples for 30 years, had expressed suspicions about the documents in an interview with the New York Times published Thursday, one in a wave of similar media reports. But Bouffard told the Globe yesterday that after further study, he now believes the documents could have been prepared on an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter available at the time ...

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/09/11/authenticity_backed_on_bush_documents/

[struggle4progress]

20. Dan Rather stands by his story (Blumenthal Sep 2007)

... In making his case, Rather will certainly establish beyond reasonable doubt that George W. Bush never completed his required service in the Texas Air National Guard. Moreover, Rather's suit will seek to demonstrate that the documents used in his "60 Minutes II" piece were not inauthentic and that he and his producers acted responsibly in presenting them and the information they contained -- and that that information is true. Indeed, no credible source has refuted the essential facts of the story ...

... Two Bush family loyalists, Richard Thornburgh, former attorney general in the elder Bush's administration, and Louis Boccardi, former executive editor and CEO of the Associated Press, were chosen to head the internal investigation ...

Rather believed that the panel would conduct a fair-minded inquiry. But he learned that neither he nor Mapes would be allowed to cross-examine witnesses. They heard from some researchers on the "60 Minutes II" staff that before they had been questioned, a CBS executive had told them that they should feel free to pin all blame on Rather and Mapes. CBS had told Rather to cease investigating the story and had even hired a private investigator of its own, Erik Rigler. Rather and Mapes discovered that Rigler's investigation had uncovered corroboration for their story. Rather's complaint states that "after following all the leads given to him by Ms. Mapes, he was of the opinion that the Killian Documents were most likely authentic, and that the underlying story was certainly accurate." But rather than probing Rigler on his findings, the panel, to the extent its lawyers questioned him in a single telephone call, "appeared more interested whether Mr. Rigler had uncovered derogatory information concerning Mr. Rather or Ms. Mapes, as to which he had no information," according to the Rather complaint. Rigler's report was suppressed, never presented to the panel, and remains suppressed by CBS. Nor did the panel fully question James Pierce, the handwriting expert consulted by "60 Minutes" who insisted that the signature on the documents was surely Killian's ...

In November 2005, Mapes published a memoir, "Truth and Duty," containing her memo to Thornburgh and Boccardi that they had failed to include in the appendix of the panel's report, although they reproduced many other memos and documents. Mapes' argument was that the Killian documents "meshed" with the facts in precise and nuanced ways. "The Killian memos, when married to the official documents, fit like a glove," she wrote. "There is not a date, or a name, or an action out of place. Nor does the content of the Killian memos differ in any way from the information that has come out after our story ... In order to conclude that the documents are forged or utterly unreliable, two questions must be answered: 1) how could anyone have forged such pristinely accurate information; and 2) why would anyone have taken such great pains to forge the truth?" ...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/09/27/dan_rather_suit/

[struggle4progress]

21. ¶¶65-71 o'th'lawsuit note Rigler, th'PI hired by CBS t'investigate, considered th'docs legit:

Here's another link to a pdf of Rather's lawsuit: http://www.observer.com/files/Rather_suit.pdf

Hard t'see why Rather'd put that in his lawsuit if he didn't intend t'argue his story was up-to-snuff

[Wickerman]

12. Fer Pete's sake indeed

we are saying the absolutely same thing. :crazy:

[selador]

15. yes

so you MUST have a big brain! :)

iow, "my boys wicked smaht!"

[joeybee12]

4. Ok, so how did the Smoking Gun figure it out so quickly, and

the LA Times didn't? Guess the reporter checked with an FBI agent who said the docs looked accurate; of course, God forbid that the journalist should actually figure out that the FBI agent might have his own agenda going on. Ridiculous, easily avodided mistake.

[selador]

7. maybe

if you are trying to determine a document's veracity u use people who are trained and have expertise in that area. in your scenario, you don't need an agenda from the agent. yer average FBI agent is not trained in forensic analysis of documents.

it may have LOOKED real. but that's not enough.

[alcibiades_mystery]

10. Forensic analysis of documents?

The Smoking Gun doubted the documents because they were typed, and the FBI had been using computers for 30 years for those kinds of reports. I suspect it wouldn't take a great deal of forensic training to notice something like that. It would be like if I received a document done in green crayola claiming to be an annual review from my boss.

[selador]

11. but again

yer average FBI agent isn't gonna know that.

i work in law enforcement. i have no idea what my agency was using 30 yrs ago (typewriters, computers, etc.)

the point is yet again (see: rather) people failed to vet documents that suited their metanarrative.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

13. Time u took a few refresher courses then.

That is, if you really desire ur law enforcement skils to be reliable in court...

(BTW: Is THAT how you fill out ur official law enforcement paperwork??? Take some advice and work on those speling skils, ossifer...)

:shrug:

[selador]

14. it wasn't in court

it was ex parte

the point is scope of knowledge, etc.

the nice thing about court is that there are RuLES of evidence, you have to be an expert to give an opinion (and i have been certified as an expert witness in certain areas - but NOT document forensics or the history of FBI printing material).

the LA times most likely (from what i see in the article) did a sloppy investigation, and got sloppy results.

there are very specific rules FOR getting documents admitted as evidence. aside from hearsay aspects (in many cases, the text OF documents is inadmissible because its hearsay), there are provenance or chain of custody issues, etc.

heck, if you want to use a document to prove a person's DRIVING HISTORY in a MINOR CIVIL INFRACTION you still need a certified abstract (stamped/notarized by the DMV).

merely cause something LOOKs kosher means exactly jack-squat.

you could show me a document purportedly one of my agencies case reports that was a clear forgery (to an expert) and it could very well LOOK kosher to me, or any other officer who didn't have SPECIFIC knowledge of facts pertinent to what materials (typewriters, laser printers, dot matrix) etc. were used THIRTY YEARS AGO.

cops (and lord knows especially FBI agents) are not omniscient.

if you want to vet a 30 yr old document you do a bit more (to put it mildly than LA Times did).

otoh, if you WANT to believe that the document is valid you do exactly what the LA times did (apparently) fail to vet documents/data/evidence that suits your narrative.

this is what got rather in trouble. same thang, different day.

[depakid]

16. The irony of course is that this is coming for the Post!

which has basically become a propaganda outlet -if not a tabloid!!

I recall at one point that its own editorial board and ombudsman published "facts" that the KNEW were false, based on their own reporting!

http://mediamatters.org/items/200609160006

That anyone outside DC even reads their crap anymore is testimony to how little weight Americans give to the credibility of their sources anymore.