Wired News Writer Faked Info
By Wired News Staff Wired News has removed three articles from its website after an internal investigation failed to confirm the authenticity of a source used in the stories.
"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."
In a phone conversation with Wired News editors, Chien had identified Ash as a professor of aeronautical engineering at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Reached by phone this week, Ash said he is not a space historian and has never participated in interviews with Chien. Ash is an aeronautical engineering professor at the university and has been involved in numerous NASA projects.
Chien is a freelance space reporter who has worked for online, print and television news outlets, and recently authored a book on the Columbia space shuttle disaster. He's written seven stories for Wired News, two of them in 2004, the other five in the past few weeks.
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 ever since questions arose last year over another reporter's sources.
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.
Chien has used Robert Stevens as a source in at least three articles published in two newspapers, which we have contacted privately. In each case he used a different description, variously calling him a retired engineer, a NASA engineer and an amateur astronomer.
In an explanation e-mailed to Wired News, Chien admitted he created the Ted Collins Hotmail account and used it in an attempt to mislead editors. But he denied using false names to pseudonymously promote his work.
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. He said that he had provided the Stevens e-mail address for Ash inadvertently, and that Ash was upset with him and had recently cut off communications.
The four other stories by Chien published on Wired News have so far checked out, but we're continuing to investigate.
