Journalists make mistakes

Drudge at 10: Now He's Fun: "Eric Slater, who was canned by the Los Angeles Times last week over a badly botched assignment, is the first to admit he was guilty of 'sloppy reporting. . . . It was the worst story I've written in my life.'
But he says the punishment was too harsh and there was no way he made anything up. 'I believe the L.A. Times thought I was Jayson Blair,' Slater says, referring to the serial fabricator at the New York Times.

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In a March 29 piece on fraternity hazing at California State University, Chico, Slater said a pledge at a nearby college died of alcohol poisoning; he did not die but was hospitalized. Slater got Chico's population wrong and quoted the university president, although Slater did not speak to him and was citing previously published interviews.
In dismissing the 11-year veteran, the Times said an editor had gone to Chico and concluded that 'the quotations from anonymous sources and from two named sources, a Mike Rodriguez and a Paul Greene, could not be verified.'
'I got lazy,' Slater says, adding that he conducted the interviews in bars and did not have phone numbers for Rodriguez and Greene. He says he could not prove he was in Chico because he slept 30 miles away on a side trip to pick up a BMW motorcycle. He also says the story 'morphed, evolved and devolved' during a torturous editing process but that he takes 'full responsibility' for the mistakes.
'Should I have been reprimanded or demoted? Yes,' says Slater, who won an award for his coverage of Afghanistan. But he argued the mistakes 'didn't warrant my dismissal.'"