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On Friday afternoon, an Associated Press (AP) story
reported that a crowd at a Bush rally in Wisconsin, responded to President
Bush’s news that former President Clinton had been hospitalized with chest
pains and faced bypass surgery, and Bush’s best wishes for Clinton’s speedy
recovery, with boos. The AP, a wire service founded in 1848, describes itself as “the largest and oldest news organization in the world.”
Audience boos as Bush offers best wishes for Clinton’s recovery
By Associated Press, 9/3/2004 13:57
WEST
ALLIS, Wis. (AP) President Bush (news - web sites) on Friday wished Bill
Clinton (news - web sites) "best wishes for a swift and speedy recovery."
"He's is in our thoughts and prayers, Bush said at a campaign rally.
Bush's audience of thousands in West Allis, Wisconsin, booed. Bush did nothing to stop them.
Bush
offered his wishes while campaigning one day after accepting the presidential
nomination at the Republican National Convention in New York. Clinton was
hospitalized in New York after complaining of mild chest pain and shortness
of breath.
Bush
recently praised Clinton when the former president went to the White House
for the unveiling of his official portrait. He lauded Clinton for his knowledge,
compassion and “the forward-looking spirit that Americans like in a president.”
In fact, however, the crowd had responded with respectful applause.
The false story was immediately caught and reported to conservative talk
radio shows and blogs. Less than one hour after the story first went out
on the wire, under the byline of AP reporter Tom Hays, it was retracted,
corrected, and the original link killed. The new title was “Bush offers best
wishes for Clinton's recovery.” There was no mention of the changes; however,
the later version without the “boos” run by the New York Times-owned Boston Globe still carried the title “audience boos as bush offers best wishes for clintons recovery” in its URL.
Some original versions of the story carried the reporter’s name, but at least
one original version and all later versions were published without a byline.
Blogger Jonathan V. Last of Galley Slaves, however, determined though a Lexis-Nexis search, that the AP reporter was Tom Hays.
Last came up with a 649-word version
of the AP story, entitled “Bill Clinton hospitalized with chest pains, will
face bypass surgery,” which included the booing, and which also credited
“Associated Press writers Ron Fournier and Frank Eltman in New York, David
Hammer in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Marc Humbert in Albany, New York …”
Last commented, “So the AP: (1) Puts out a story with falsified reporting;
(2) Pulls the story; (3) Removes the faulty reporting; (4) Makes no note
of its mistake; and then (5) Pulls the byline of the reporter who made the
error. If you were going to impute bad faith to the folks at AP -- and at
this point that's not unreasonable to do -- you might suspect that they have
pulled Tom Hays's byline to protect him.”
At AP headquarters in New York, staffer Mark Kennedy, an entertainment
writer, directed this reporter to the wire service’s corporate communications
division, adding, “We’re also supposed to note that we, that we changed the
[crowd] reaction from, to ‘oohs of surprise,’ apparently rather than ‘boos,’
if that makes any difference.”
By press time, AP corporate communications had not responded to telephone and e-mail requests for comment.
New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix has written for Toogood Reports, Middle American News, the New York Post, Daily News, American Enterprise, Insight, Chronicles, Newsday and many other publications. His recent work is collected at The Critical Critic.
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