“The story was just too good to be checked.”
Well, they were talking to someone at the “Republic of Florida”, and he appeared to ‘claim’ the shooter. Where, exactly, would you go to cross-check that?
I don’t like defending the AP, but they weren’t just duped, they were lied to.
I guess cosmic justice evens this stuff out. The AP probably deserves this because they have so often run salacious stories with anonymous witnesses. They were more likely to get ‘played’ then with the discussion being off-the-record. Now they got zapped by somebody who was actually on the record. LOL!
If I’m not mistaken, the local sheriff said that his department was very familiar with the group and he wasn’t a member. That could have confirmed/debunked the claim.
They weren’t talking to the head of the ROF directly. The first story I read reported that the ADL provided information about his association with the group to the AP. The ROF guy later claimed to have been confused by the ADL’s questions. It sounds to me that the ADL went looking for a connection and forwarded it to the AP for distribution with ‘credibility’.