MEDIA

A reporter accused his bosses of burying a scandal. They say he’s lying.

By Paul Farhi
Updated July 29, 2022 at 2:12 p.m. EDT | Published July 29, 2022 at 9:13 a.m. EDT

In reporter Paul Pringle’s vivid retelling, his blockbuster exposé of a campus scandal was thwarted at every turn by law enforcement and university officials. But the biggest obstacle, he contends, were the editors at his own newspaper, the Los Angeles Times.

Pringle’s new book, “Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels,” recounts his pursuit of a story about Carmen Puliafito, a former dean of the University of Southern California’s medical school. The highly regarded eye surgeon had a secret life as a drug abuser who associated with addicts and criminals.

The book, which alleges that top editors at the Times tried to slow-roll and suppress the story for months to protect the university, has been greeted with enthusiastic write-ups. A reviewer at the New York Times lauded it as “a master class in investigative journalism.” Another — in the Los Angeles Times, no less — compared Pringle’s book to famous tales of journalistic heroism such as “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight.”

Pringle’s former editors have their own review: It’s a pack of lies. ... “The entire premise is false,” said Marc Duvoisin, who oversaw Pringle’s original story in 2017 as the Times’s managing editor, in an interview. ... The Times’s former editor and publisher, Davan Maharaj, told The Washington Post the book is “largely a work of fantasy. … Much of it takes place in his own imagination.” A third editor who worked on the story, Matthew Doig, published a 3,500-word rebuttal of the book online, complete with scans of his handwritten edit notes, to counter Pringle’s “half-truths and bad-faith misrepresentations.”

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This story has been updated to clarify Grad’s statement about the “secret” team of reporters.

By Paul Farhi
Paul Farhi is The Washington Post's media reporter. He started at The Post in 1988 and has been a financial reporter, a political reporter and a Style reporter. Twitter https://twitter.com/farhip