LA Times Gets Bamboozled

The LA Times ran a story the other day based on fabricated documents, but that isn't news to anybody familiar with the mainstream media. The real shocker in this story is that now they actually admit they did it and apologized

The Los Angeles Times apologized for using documents that were apparently fabricated in a story implicating associates of Sean "Diddy" Combs in a 1994 assault on rapper Tupac Shakur.

"The bottom line is that the documents we relied on should not have been used," Editor Russ Stanton said in a story posted Wednesday night on the newspaper's Web site. "We apologize both to our readers and to those referenced in the documents ... and in the story."

Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Chuck Philips, who wrote the story, and his supervisor, Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin, also apologized.

The apologies followed an investigation launched by Stanton after The Smoking Gun Web site reported earlier in the day that the paper was conned by a prisoner who doctored the documents.

Looks like the "Dan Rather School of Journalism" is alive and well; i.e., run with any junk you can make up and see if others can prove you are wrong. At least they did not try the "fake but accurate" line of garbage.

You might well wonder why the MSM seems to have a habit of running these bungled stories. This may be a hint:

The story and related features on latimes.com attracted nearly 1 million hits -- more viewers than any other story on latimes.com this year, the newspaper said.

It is becoming clear that the MSM is simply becoming a forum for rumors and half-baked theories, all in pursuit of hits and readership.

The MSM, printing all the stories that fit their agenda.