AP a Disgrace to Journalism

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.