Saturday, April 5, 2008

Los Angeles Times

The November 1994 assault on Tupac Shakur remains a source of fascination and frustration to law officials and fans. No one was ever charged in the attack

The Times apologizes over article on rapper

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The November 1994 assault on Tupac Shakur remains a source of fascination and frustration to law officials and fans. No one was ever charged in the attack.

By James Rainey, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 27, 2008

A Los Angeles Times story about a brutal 1994 attack on rap superstar Tupac Shakur was partially based on documents that appear to have been fabricated, the reporter and editor responsible for the story said Wednesday.

Reporter Chuck Philips and his supervisor, Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin, issued statements of apology Wednesday afternoon. The statements came after The Times took withering criticism for the Shakur article, which appeared on latimes.com last week and two days later in the paper's Calendar section.

FOR THE RECORD:
Tupac Shakur: An article in Thursday's Section A on The Times' plan to investigate its March 17 report on rapper Tupac Shakur gave the wrong first name for the lawyer for rap talent manager James Rosemond. He is Jeffrey Lichtman, not Marc.

The criticism came first from The Smoking Gun website, which said the newspaper had been the victim of a hoax, and then from subjects of the story, who said they had been defamed.

"In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job," Philips said in a statement Wednesday. "I'm sorry."

In his statement, Duvoisin added: "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."

Times Editor Russ Stanton announced that the newspaper would launch an internal review of the documents and the reporting surrounding the story. Stanton said he took the criticisms of the March 17 report "very seriously."

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