A textbook case of bad reporting — More fodder for the bloggers as the LA Times now looks like its editors are falling down on the job.

This is a story about a 19-year vet who screwed up a news story to the point where he begins to look like Jaysen Blair or Phil Glass. He is going to eat crap for quite a while if he doesn’t get fired. Usually carelessness that goes unchecked like this has a history. And now the cover-your-ass-types will begin to dig.

I would like to add a couple of points about second-hand quotes. Apparently in this case the writer lifted a quote as though he had collected it. I use second-hand quotes all the time, many people do. Some are taken from press releases and they are free to use, but I still attribute them to the release. Others are taken from other reports. It’s very easy to say “according to reports” or “was quoted as saying” to indicate that the quote was not collected by the writer. To merely quote the person as though he or she had said this to you is both inexcuseable and unnecessary. Readers generally do not care. It would have to be pressure from the paper itself that caused this sort of mis-attribution. Some hard-ass editors do not want to see ANY attributed quotes. This policy would be fine if these same papers never ran wire services either, but they all do. It’s off of these same wire services that most attributed quotes are derived.

CW Nevius, below, gives us the gory details:

To be blunt, Slater’s story was a mess.

That’s not one opinion. Many people agree, from Chico State President Paul Zingg to the management of the Los Angeles Times.

Even Slater thinks so. After the Times printed a correction two days later, he wrote a rambling public e-mail in which he called the Chico piece “the worst story in my 19-year journalism career.”

But the point here is not that a reporter did a bad job on a story. It goes deeper than that, and at a time when public trust in the news media has never been lower, it goes to the heart of what we do and our relationship with our readers.

Certainly Slater’s story was not an advertisement for a paper that would win two Pulitzer Prizes the next week. Slater missed the population of Chico by 36,000, said a student at a nearby college died when he was only hospitalized, quoted Zingg without mentioning that he’d lifted the quote from a local newspaper rather than speak to Zingg himself, and said Chico State was well known for basketball when he surely meant baseball.

Those are just the errors cited in the correction, but now it may be getting worse.

“It is certainly beginning to look like much of it, if not all of it, is a fabrication,” Zingg said Friday.

Serious questions are now being raised. Some people are asking whether Slater even went to Chico.