who do you trust?

Once upon a time in the late 1950s, there was a TV game show with that ungrammatical name, hosted by Johnny Carson.

These days, it’s a question we have to ask ourselves every time we open a newspaper. Howard Kurtz reports in the WaPo:

The Los Angeles Times has acknowledged that it unwittingly relied on fabricated FBI documents, created by a con man, for a report that implicated associates of rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs in the 1994 shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur.

The story’s author, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chuck Philips, said in a statement late yesterday: “In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job. I’m sorry.” Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin also apologized, saying in a separate statement: “We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck’s. I deeply regret that we let our readers down.”

The embarrassing admission came hours after a report by the Smoking Gun. The Web site, which specializes in law-enforcement records, said the Times “appears to have been hoaxed” by “an accomplished document forger” in its story last week tying Combs’s associates to the non-fatal shooting of Shakur 12 years ago.

Once more, online triumphs over print. Increasingly, the Web is a check on the MSM.

Across the Pond, a more traditional check on the media brought judgment to bear last week. In a first for the British media, the tabs apologized to one of their victims:

The headline, splashed across the top of the front page of The Daily Express on Wednesday, could not have been clearer or more jarring: “Kate and Gerry McCann: Sorry.”

The paper indeed had something to be sorry about. In the ensuing article, it admitted that much of its coverage of the case of Madeleine McCann, who disappeared shortly before her fourth birthday during a family vacation in Portugal last May, was completely wrong. Especially the part where it had repeatedly accused Madeleine’s parents, Kate and Gerry, of murdering her and then covering up their crime.

I don’t follow the British media to know what kind of effect this had, or is expected to have in the future. But at the very least it’s a kick in the pants for the outrageous British press … for now.

Meanwhile, we’re all left with the ungrammatical and nagging question: who do I trust?