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It's a massive editorial screwup by the Associated Press.

They ran a long story yesterday that had the correct date (March 17th) for the protest/counter, and it also mentioned that March 20th was the 4th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Apparently somebody at "AP Broadcast" did some very sloppy editing, to make the story short enough for nightly news broadcasts, and they used the wrong date for the protest.

I saw the glaring error in the AP "broadcast" story at around 1pm. I called AP's DC offices then and the woman I talked to said that the AP story she had was the long one that they published last night. I told her that the story with the incorrect date (March 20 instead of March 17) was posted on, at that time, 37 different TV station websites across the US.

She said, "Oh! That would be AP Broadcast. They probably took our long story and shortened it for broadcast purposes." She said she would try to get in touch with someone.

Not accepting that AP would fix their mistake in anything resembling a timely manner, I looked up a phone number for the AP Broadcast people and called them. (1-800-821-4747 ) I talked to a guy named Rudy and told him that the date was incorrect in the story that they sent out to their TV broadcast customers, and I gave him a link to the GOE website so he could see that I wasn't pulling his leg. That was as 1:43PM.

He said he would check it out and see if he could get a correction out.

I received a phone call back from Rudy at 3:09PM and he asked me the same questions that he had asked 1-1/2 hours earlier; and he said he would try and get the story corrected.

Well, at 6PM the inaccurate story was still up on the stations that subscribe to the AP Broadcast news service (around 200).

And those TV stations are reporting the incorrect information on their evening news,

Sigh.

So now all the television stations that pay good money for AP's professional services are reporting an inaccurate news story, 5 hours after AP was informed that key information in their story was wrong.

You can talk to "AP Broadcast" at this number:

1-800-821-4747