Note to staff on the Tupac Shakur investigative piece

March 27, 2008 4:11 PM PT

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Below is a memo from Times Publisher David Hiller and Editor Russ Stanton about today’s report on the Tupac Shakur story of March 17.

Reader reaction on the topic can be found here.

Most of you have no doubt seen today’s front page report that a Times story about the

1994 attack on Tupac Shakur was based on fake documents provided to us by a source for

the story. Simply stated, we got duped, and we have apologized. Here’s a link to this

Situations like this are thankfully very rare, but they do happen. And when they do,

the most important thing is to understand what happened, own up to it, and try to make

things right as soon as possible. That’s what we have been doing over the last two

days.

You may also be interested in the statement Russ made:

“We published this story with the sincere belief that the documents were genuine, but

our good intentions are beside the point. 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.’

David Hiller

Russ Stanton