I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism.
I am immensely contrite. And I'm sorry for the damage I've done.
It's hard to say what role race really played in my case.
If they're all so brilliant and I'm such an affirmative-action hire, how come they didn't catch me?
Once I had a better beat, I needed to have an even better one. And somewhere in that climbing, I lost sight of, sort of, my moral and ethical underpinnings.
When we report stories, we don't just want to talk to people who did the right thing. We want to talk to people who did the wrong thing.