The Plot Thickens...

So, Eric Slater was quoted in the Washington Post today (scroll down a wee bit past the stuff on Drudge and Albom) about how he never made up a source. I have a couple bones to pick with what he said:

In dismissing the 11-year veteran, the Times said an editor had gone to Chico and concluded that "the quotations from anonymous sources and from two named sources, a Mike Rodriguez and a Paul Greene, could not be verified."

"I got lazy," Slater says, adding that he conducted the interviews in bars and did not have phone numbers for Rodriguez and Greene. He says he could not prove he was in Chico because he slept 30 miles away on a side trip to pick up a BMW motorcycle. He also says the story "morphed, evolved and devolved" during a torturous editing process but that he takes "full responsibility" for the mistakes.

Well, that's all fine and dandy, except for a few details.

First, if he was spending the night somewhere other than Chico on this side trip to pick up his motorcycle ("a town 30 miles away?" Red Bluff and Marysville/Yuba City are both further than that, while Paradise and Orland are both closer. Maybe Oroville, Gridley or Biggs?) why the heck did he have all these bar quotes? The activity at bars in Chico doesn't pick up until later at night, and as improbable as it is for a 19-year old to come out of the Crazy Horse stumbling drunk anytime, the odds diminish even more during the middle of the day or early evening, especially in a bar where bouncers have flashlights, there are black lights all over the place, and there is a scanner to run the ID. I'm not talking on off-hand, drunken-haze observations from across the room. I have a friend that was just hired as a doorman at the Crazy Horse.

How can he paint all these nighttime scenes when he would have been staying the night in a different (and much smaller) town 30 miles away?

Not to mention, if he bought this motorcycle, wouldn't he have some sort of paperwork from the transfer, assuming he bought it used from someone else? If the motorcycle has a license plate, Slater has to become the new registered owner. Just speaking without personally looking into it, that would require the name (and address) of the previous owner, right?

Second, he now interviewed Mike Rodriguez at a bar? That's different than what Slater wrote in his story:

At least one student left town to escape that reputation. Outside a quiet coffee shop in downtown Chico, Mike Rodriguez, who studied computer science at the school for two years before moving to Sacramento and graduating from college there, sipped black coffee alone and explained why he left not only the school, but also his hometown, for two years.

Sitting down and having a conversation with a person at a coffee house (or bar, we really dunno now), alone even, and no phone number gets exchanged? That seems sketch.