Pulitzer-winning reporter Chuck Philips latest sources that now appear to be scam

By Alex Ben Block

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) – 3/27/2008 – The Los Angeles Times appears to have been caught in a scam that resulted in the publication of a false and defamatory story about Sean “Diddy” Combs that, according to the Smoking Gun website, was a fabrication by a clever prison inmate seeking to link himself with the biggest names in hip hop music culture. This becomes the first big crisis for recently appointed editor Russ Stanton, who has said he is investigating what happened.

If anyone is on the hook for this huge public embarrassment at a most awkward time (shortly after the company was sold and has to publically downsized its staff) it is reporter Chuck Phillips, who has made a career out of his reporting on the dark side of music. Phillips won a Pulitizer Prize in 1999, primarily for reporting that then Recording Academy head Mike Greene sexually harassed an employee and claims he checks and double checks anonymous sources.

“I have to, in my mind, have double or triple sourcing on something and people who hadn’t spoken to each other and I can assure myself that they haven’t spoken to each other. Because I’ve had two people try to set me up,” Phillips told MTV News yesterday. “ I would catch them. But if you have three, you never get tripped up. I learned that writing about the music business, because I’d write about big deals that were coming out or a firing that would happen five days before it happened. And you had to be right about that sh–, because those guys would sue your ass. But in this case, I don’t write anything until I feel it’s confident, it’s true.”

Now it appears Philips system was not full proof. His claim that Combs and another hip hop artist knew about the 1994 plans in advance to ambush and murder rapper Tupac Shakur as he entered the Quad Studios in Los Angeles.

Now Combs high powered attorney Howard Weitzman says his client was misled by Phillips when he sought comment, and that Phillips violated the L.A. Times own code of ethics. Weitzman demanded that the paper pull the story and print a retraction. The paper instead ran the story on the web, and then in print; and now says it is investigating the situation.

This comes at a particularly embarrassing time for the paper. The parent company, Tribune, was recently sold to investor Sam Zell, who has been putting on pressure to improve the product while cutting the staff. This was already a sore subject at the Time where Editor John Carroll and two successors had quit rather than make cuts they felt would hurt the editorial product.

Now it is the quality of that editorial product that is being called into question. In its defense of over-spending in the eyes of its owners, the LA Times would always point to editorial quality. Time will tell how this will play out in the eyes of the public and owners that wish to trim the huge LA Times entertainment-related editorial budget.