By Jamilah King
By now, the latest “who-shot-Tupac” fiasco is all over the news. The basics go something like this: LA Times reporter Chuck Phillips writes a groundbreaking investigative story that strongly implicates P. Diddy’s camp in the 1994 shooting that sparked the whole East Coast/West Coast feud. The piece, which relied entirely on a confidential source, sent shockwaves through the music industry.
Meanwhile, hiphopdx and the Smoking Gun were all, like, “Ummm…no.”
Now, the story is under investigation because it turns out that Phillips’s confidential witness is a con man. The paper posted an apology on their Web site late last night.
From the Smoking Gun:
The con man, James Sabatino, 31, has long sought to insinuate himself, after the fact, in a series of important hip-hop events, from Shakur’s shooting to the murder of the Notorious B.I.G. In fact, however, Sabatino was little more than a rap devotee, a wildly impulsive, overweight white kid from Florida whose own father once described him in a letter to a federal judge as “a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug.”
Whoops.
Maybe the problem with journalism is that it’s always more than just a story. In this case, what’s really at stake is justice, that elusive and ever-changing ideal that’s been teasing black folks since slavery. The sensationalism that surrounds the Tupac-Biggie saga often overshadows the innate dreams that each rapper carried on his shoulders. They were the larger-than-life personalities who spoke for thousands of complex individuals caught up between the failures of the Civil Rights Movement and the success of Reaganomics. Of course, such artists weren’t without their gluttonous and painful vices, but so goes life for artists in their early 20s.
Ill doctrine takes the paper – and the industry – to task: