When the story stands out, it might be a little too good

March 31, 2008 Coming of age in communist Bulgaria, my jeans were cut with scissors on the street by the police because they were deemed too tight, my dad was detained for telling a political joke, and I got expelled from high school for listening to the Beatles. In probably the biggest journalistic blunder since the botched George W. Bush military service story on "60 Minutes," the Times on Wednesday apologized for using "apparently fabricated documents" in the Combs-Shakur expose after the Smoking Gun exposed them as fakes. In a society of overachievers, it's often very hard to stand out on your own merits, so to compensate for a normal middle-class upbringing or to bolster political credentials, it's tempting to spice things up.

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