Dibs

What with all the explosive news this week about faked “news” photographs from Lebanon and wire services firing the freelancers who took them, now Wired News has yanked three articles from its site amid suspicions that their writer — who is an author as well as a journalist — invented a source. “Tribal Curse Haunts Launch Pad” (June 27, 2006), “NASA Boosts Heart-Monitoring Tech” (July 7, 2006) and “Don’t Flush It – Breathe It” (July 14, 2006), all by Philip Chien, “relied in part on quotes and citations from Robert Ash, described in the first two stories as a ‘space historian’ and in the last as an ‘aeronautical engineer and amateur space historian.’ … Reached by phone this week, Ash said he is not a space historian and has never participated in interviews with Chien.” A freelance aerospace reporter who has spent over twenty years covering the US space program, Chien is the author of Columbia: Final Voyage, a book that came out earlier this year about the tragic 2003 space-shuttle flight. According to Wired, “Chien’s reporting came under scrutiny when he submitted a draft article citing a different source, Ted Collins, along with contact information for Collins, as required by Wired News…. An investigation traced the name and Hotmail account provided to a Usenet posting praising Chien’s work. Wired News senior editor Kevin Poulsen then compared the IP address of the poster and Chien’s computer and discovered they matched. An e-mail sent to Wired News from the Ted Collins account also originated with the same IP address. Poulsen linked Chien’s IP address to at least one other Hotmail account, created under the name Robert Stevens, which Chien had provided to Wired News as contact information for Ash. The name and address were used in additional Usenet posts making positive comments about Chien’s work.” Ouch!!! In an apology emailed to Wired, “Chien admitted he created the Ted Collins Hotmail account and used it in an attempt to mislead editors…. He also claimed his quotes are accurate and correctly attributed. Chien wrote that Collins died in 1997, but said he liked his quotes so much he wanted to use them posthumously.” So much harder to get away with stuff these days, thanks to the magic of electronic information networks.