New York Times, March 27, 2008
By Mike Nizza

A stormy day at the Los Angeles Times began with charges that a controversial story was based on forged documents, and ended with apologies from a veteran reporter, his supervisor and the paper’s new executive editor, Russ Stanton:

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.

Chuck Philips, who wrote the story tying the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs to a 1994 attack that seriously wounded rapper Tupac Shakur, said that he was convinced that the documents were fake after an extensive examination by The Smoking Gun, an online investigative magazine. “I failed to do my job,” he said, according to the paper. “I’m sorry.”

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