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- To set the record straight… If you make mistakes, you apologize. When I was at grad school, I was working on a documentary and I was also contracted to write a long, six thousand word piece… I borrowed some thoughts from a guy’s book… Not incidents, none of that, sort of light stuff… I made a mistake as a student and I apologized for it.
Later on, at The New York Times, it was post-Jason Blair…like a witch hunt. Everybody wanted to get everybody that worked there and I wasn’t really accused of plagiarism, but what I did was did not attribute some facts that I distilled from a book about the Los Angeles River which I kayaked, and all this went round and round and all of a sudden I was a fraud, I was a cheat, I was a minority who didn’t do his work, who got a break because of his background and it isn’t true...
All I’ve ever tried to do in life is tell the truth, work hard, document the undocumented. I’ve crossed the border with Mexicans, man, I worked in a slaughterhouse, I do what it takes, I don’t cheat… My problem with the Right Wing and the Left Wing… is they got so many facts wrong… the journalistic sin is: you write something about somebody, you man up, and you call them. So the facts are wrong… A commissioned officer in the Navy accused me of misquoting him, I don’t think I did. If I did, I apologized about it. You write a thousand, two thousand stories, it’s gonna happen.
I don’t fake quotes, I don’t fake stories, I don’t fake anything, man. I work hard… This is how I get people to talk to me, because I don’t lie about who I am, I don’t hang around the edges, I don’t mischaracterize myself for the business at hand. I’m straightforward and I’m trying to be a standup guy. (en)
- An article last Monday about the Los Angeles River recounted its history and described the reporter's trip downriver in a kayak. In research for the article, the reporter consulted a 1999 book by Blake Gumprecht, "The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth." Several passages relating facts and lore about the river distilled passages from the book. Although the facts in those passages were confirmed independently—through other sources or the reporter's first hand observation—the article should have acknowledged the significant contribution of Mr. Gumprecht's research. (en)
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