Do Your Job

Going into this project I was very much inclined to support Philips and give him the benefit of the doubt.

I can’t make that claim any longer.

While no amount of analysis and research will ever give us the entire truth surrounding the mistakes that Philips and the LA Times made in publishing this story the fact remains they did publish it and it was filled with many mistakes.

Within the Hip Hop community you hear lots of rumors and they are written off as just that – rumors. For someone who isn’t inside this scene I can see where you might hear things and want to run with them. But if you are going to be reporting something as fact, you need to find the facts.

As this story progressed on Philips desk, I feel like he should have been questioning the legitimacy of Sabatino. That, in my mind, is the story they could have run with and produced a great article.

As it stands Philips trusted sources and documents that he flat out should not have. Regardless of his track record he messed up. While the quick admittance and apology is nice it doesn’t undo the error.

If journalists are going to maintain any level of credibility with the public scenarios like this have to be eliminated. Yes I know mistakes happen, and if this were a simple case of a writer messing up I could probably forgive him.

But it wasn’t.

As I have outlined over the course of this blog, the evidence was their to at least raise red flags and, as it turned out, those flags would have led to some more serious realizations about the supposed “facts” of the story.

The Hip Hop community knew it immediately, the editor for the Smoking Gun new something was up and his reporters did their homework – something Philips ignored.

But did he ignore the process of researching the facts or did he ignore facts he found so as to put out a sensationalized story?

Neither option is too appealing, but a procedural step that was missed is something that can be reiterated as a must during the reporting.

And if it’s the latter, Philips will be another journalist responsible for furthering the publics continual distrust in the media.

Anonymous Sources?

As we have broken down the facts and analyzed the mistakes and possible repercussions of Philips articles the question, for me, that still lingers is his use of anonymous sources.

“Anonymous sources are a problem in journalism,” said Don Smith, interactivity editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Smith made several points about the need for journalists to maintain their degree of separation from an event and the need for reporters to admit when they are basing their story on hearsay.

Philips claims that he checks his sources information multiple times and won’t “write it just because some says it.” If this is how he conducts himself, how did he make such blatant errors in the story?

In an email response to a request for an interview he told me that “A lot of peculiar things happened before and after the story broke.” He wouldn’t get more in depth with me, but for someone who has the experience he has the oversight here is outstanding.

In an interview with Hip Hop DX, an online Hip Hop news magazine, prior to the revelation that the documents were forged Philips said they “came up on those documents later after I was pretty much sure of what happened.”

I continually see these contradictions as evidence that he rushed into this story without as much thought as should be given to such a serious topic. The story was, in large part, false! It was proven to be just over a week after it’s publication. How could he have been confident in his reporting and the “facts” prior to the documents when the documents were the basis for the entire story?

Even if he was, where was that reporting in the article? Continuously he refers to the documents and unnamed FBI informants. Did he seek to confirm the documents with a third party completely separate from his source for them? These are questions I hope have been addressed by the LA Times internal investigation and I hope the answers are made public.

As Smith pointed out to me, the use of anonymous sources is often for gaining information you can then take to another party and confirm your assumptions – on the record. There is no on the record confirmation of any of Philips claims, just his "reporting" and that of this “informant.”

Philips has made the point that he is dealing with criminals and he can’t divulge anything about his contacts as their lives may then be in danger. In dealing with criminals you have to consider their motive for saying anything. This isn’t to say you can’t believe them, but you should take extra steps to ensure they are factual. In this case it doesn’t appear as though he even took the most basic steps.

An Article Gone Wrong (Part 2)

We continue to look at Philips article and the complications to consider. If you missed Part 1 check it out here!

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Given the lack of cause to rush the story to press why wasn’t it investigated more fully? What prompted them to run the story with admittedly less scrutiny than usual?

“An investigative piece will usually be looked at by an assistant managing editor, a managing editor and probably a lawyer,” says Don Smith, interactivity editor for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer of their standards for review.

It is the lawyer element that I’m most curious about. This story of Philips is implicated powerful people within the music industry, who will not take kindly to being portrayed as violent criminals. A journalist’s job is to report the truth and the paper he or she writes for should support them when they need it, but on the flip side of that coin the paper also needs to question their reporter and ensure the vetting process is thoroughly completed.

“Lawyers will begin to challenge the facts,” Smith explains about the role they can play in the editorial process. Their role here, I imagine, would have been to take these documents – legal court records something they should have plenty of experience with and look at their validity.

While this should also have been expected of Philips, Jack Shafer of Slate.com points out one possible explanation as to why Philips could have ran with the information he had:

“Avoid confirmation bias. It's a universal human trait to seek evidence that confirms what you already believe, to interpret the evidence you've collected to bolster your existing view, and to avoid the evidence that would undermine your notions. "Philips said in an interview that he had believed the documents were legitimate because, in the reporting he had already done on the story, he had heard many of the same details," the Times reports today. Did Philips' willingness to believe what the documents said blind him to the typographic clues that the Smoking Gun says point to forgery? "[The documents] confirmed many of the things I'd learned on my own," Philips said in an interview [this interview has since been pulled from the Times site] before the debunking.”

While this is understandable, it is still inexcusable. Philips is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter. He knows what it takes to investigate something and he knows, or should know, that he can’t allow his own opinions and biases to get in the way of the truth – that is what he should be in search of.

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!