The AP - Slow Roasted

Robert Bateman is the latest person to slam the Associated Press for its stories extensively quoting a non-existent Iraqi police captain. (They are getting more bad press from more sources all of a sudden.) But Bateman also has direct personal experience with an earlier fabricated story that the AP spewed. In fact, he tried to get them to correct it and they tried to get him fired for doing so.

I have got direct experience of this - from challenging the AP's seriously flawed 1999 "scoop" about the masssacre near the South Korean village of No Gun Ri during the opening days of the Korean War.

Bad things did happen at No Gun Ri, of this there can be no doubt. My own research and other historians', as well as the joint U.S.-Korean government investigation, confirms that a tragedy occurred - there were civilians who were killed there, by our side, and that was wrong.

But the AP's sensationalistic story painted it as a deliberate massacre, done with machine guns at extremely close range.

The most sensational account started in the 57th paragraph of the 3,448-word story, sourced to one Edward Daily. As AP told it, Daily was the only soldier at No Gun Ri who directly received orders from his officers to turn his water-cooled .30 caliber machinegun on the civilians and shoot them down in cold blood at point-blank range.

Daily's account was chilling. It was also - as AP should have known - a fantasy.

The AP story took at face value Daily's claims that he was a combat infantryman who won a battlefield commission just a few days after the events at No Gun Ri, and had been awarded the Distinguished Cross and three Purple-Hearts.

In reality, he was an enlisted mechanic in an entirely different unit, nowhere near No Gun Ri. He had fabricated his biography and credentials as well as his entire account of the events at No Gun Ri.

Bate goes on to excoriate the AP for their use of a fictional character as a source for news, but even more for their lame and self-serving defense of their stories. Read the whole thing, it is rather entertaining. The problem here is that the AP, given its recent history, is actively undermining faith in the media as a whole. That is bad for everyone and bad for the nation itself. They appear to be too arrogant to care, however. They have gotten away with this kind of fiction in the past and assume they will now, too. The difference these days is the pajama-clad fact checkers. This will continue to bleed the AP's only real asset - its credibility. They just do not seem to understand that.

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  By daveinboca, Saturday, 9 December , 2006 @ 7:40 am

  The Associated Press is basically suffering what happens to all large corporations with a virtual monopoly, it is becoming sloppy, incompetant, and unaccountable. The New York Post link above puts Robert Bateman, an historian and reporter, giving one man’s story of how the AP covered up evidence that its Pulitzer-Prize nominated story about an incident in the Korean War was completely falsified by a man later convicted for getting PTSD treatment for combat that he did not endure.

  Not only that, but this spurious news organization tried to wreck Bateman’s career by attempting to stop his academic research and then the publishing of his book. More lately, this fraudulent excuse for journalism had an article out yesterday that neglected to give the state country or any relevant details about the woman who had three dead fetuses in her refrigerator! Whatever happened to who, what, when, where, etc.?

  More serious, the Iraqi government and the U.S. Army have long warned the AP about
  

  its use of “spokesmen” who don’t exist. Indeed this time it appears that there is no such officer in the Iraqi police force in Baghdad. More, they could find no evidence of such an attack (though they did see that one mosque had been hit with some gasoline and had some smoke and scorching damage in the entryway).

  Did the AP retract or reinvestigate? Nah. Instead, in a follow-up story a few days later, it simply noted the old (2005) news about efforts to plant Coalition press releases in the Iraqi media, accused the Iraqis of censorship and claimed that it had found three more (anonymous, naturally) witnesses. In effect, AP said that, no matter what the Iraqi police headquarters said, Hussein is one of its spokesmen after all.

  Bizarrely, it seems that not even Iraqi Sunni politicians believe the AP story; even the radical Association of Muslim Scholars hasn’t embraced the account. But we here are supposed to anyway. After all, AP doesn’t make mistakes.
  The AP has a number of executives, including Kathleen Carroll, who are simply giving disinformation and false sourcing in their stories. For that, the CSJ, whose students nowadays cheat on take-home ethics exams to practice for their Pulitzer scams, are predictably taking notes on just how to Mau-mau the flak-catchers, Kathleen Carroll style

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