Some might remember earlier this year when a Chuck Phillips, a Pultizer Prize-winning music journalist at the Los Angeles Times, forced the paper to publish a front page correction after an embarrassingly inaccurate report linking the murder of Tupac Shakur to the Notorious B.I.G. and Sean "Diddy" (then "Puffy") Combs. The Tribune Company has been laying off multiple newsroom staffers, and in this round, Phillips was among those out of a job. Is this an inevitability of a crumbling print media industry, or retribution for a bit of shoddy reporting?
It's probably a little of both. Phillips' past reports on the Tupac and Biggie murders have had their reliability questioned. The documents he used in this case, which came from a con-man prison inmate, may have been the last straw. Though considering he got canned along with dozens of other staffers, it's unlikely he would have gotten the same treatment in a better time for the industry.
[MTV.com]
