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Earlier this month, while doing my research, I happened upon a post by some random blogger out of the Ukraine named Slav Kandyba.

The blogger was going in hard on music mogul Sean Combs for dissing Slav’s cohort Chuck Phillips of the LA Times. His post was an open letter to Sean Combs that basically threatened his life. Bol has more on that here.

The hater that I am, I quickly scanned the post hoping for a good quote to highlight on my site. I never found a good quote unless you consider this good:

“You might be a smooth criminal, but when you pick on the media, you pick into the devil’s nest and you will get stung.”

In fact, after 3 paragraphs I dismissed the post as the ramblings of another incoherent hater.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, the post was part of a test Hip Hop blog created by the LA Times (yes, the LA TIMES). And the Chuck Phillips mentioned in the post was the same cat who wrote that error-riddled expose on Sean Combs and Tupac Shakur that was ultimately retracted by the LA Times.

I don’t care if Chuck is a Pulitzer winning reporter, his reporting/research skills are suspect. In fact, there’s only one reason why Chuck hasn’t met the same fate as former Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who returned her Pulitzer after it was determined she fabricated the story that earned her the top prize. Did I mention that Janet is black?

Anyway, fearing another huge scandal, the headz at the LA Times abruptly pulled the post that threatened Puffy, and they made sure that the Hip Hop blog itself would never see the light of day.

The bigger story here is how The Times thought that no one would find that content online before they pulled it? Haven’t they ever heard of Google Alerts over there?