An Article Gone Wrong (Part 1)

On March 17th the Hip Hop world awoke to a story that was sure to shock and make many reflect on events long forgotten. Not that we didn’t remember the infamous shooting of Tupac Shakur at Quad Recording studios, how could we with the multiple songs and rants ‘Pac went on to record after his recovery.

But this story, like another one from 2002 by the same author – award winning writer for the LA Times Chuck Philips, left many fans of the music perplexed. Who was this guy writing about us? Why was he so determined to investigate the murders of ‘Pac and Biggie? And where was he getting his facts?

Within the Hip Hop community there is often talk of criminal activity and artists try to build up connections to the street, but Philips story was straight out of your favorite rappers favorite gangsta flick.

Reporting the events of the evening from FBI documents of interviews with a confidential informant and his own anonymous sources Philips paints a picture of gangsters turned Hip Hop entrepreneurs and in the process implicates current power player Jimmy “Henchman” Rosemond (Rapper The Game’s manager) as the mastermind behind the shooting, along with a young man named James Sabatino.

The problem? The Smoking Gun website investigated Philips “documents” and found them to be filled with misspellings, featuring many of the same errors as documents filed by Sabatino in other unrelated court matters, along with convenient redactions of officers names and other information that would help place the documents. The documents were also found to have been prepared on a typewriter – which the FBI stopped using over thirty years ago. Finally the Smoking Gun showed the documents to retired FBI agents who didn’t recognize standard Bureau protocol within them.
Just as with the Dan Rather document scandal in 2004, it was the new internet journalists who had challenged the facts and proved the error.

But had the damage been done? The Times stated in their retraction that “the story was reviewed by [Marc] Duvoisin [Philips supervisor and Deputy managing editor] and two editors on the copy desk. Other investigative stories published by The Times in recent years have in some cases received the scrutiny of at least one more editor and often of the managing editor or editor of the newspaper. The Shakur piece did not receive that many layers of review.”

This is one of the key elements to what went wrong here. This story isn’t time sensitive. It is looking at events that took place over a decade ago – and the last major story at all related was written by Philips for the Times, they had the story and no one was chasing it… although then the question becomes why is this one guy following a “story” when it doesn’t seem to actually be a story?

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Be sure to come back tomorrow for part 2 of the analysis of Philips errors!