I did the heavy screaming and let John have sense enough to write an article on the AP plagiarism mess. While I find the AP's actions unethical, I find their excuses pathetic and quite frankly still missing something... truth maybe, attribution, something regarding integrity? Ya know, that kind of stuff.

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Associated Press says they based article on Raw Story report but refuses to credit or correct

John Byrne
Published: Tuesday March 28, 2006

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The Associated Press has confirmed using a Raw Story report as the basis for a Mar. 14 article detailing a change to national security clearance policies but has refused to issue credit for the piece.

Their article, "Security Clearance Rules May Impede Gays," signaled an apparent Bush Administration attempt to tighten security clearances with regard to gay Americans. It attributed the discovery of the clearance changes to gay rights groups – a factually inaccurate statement which the agency has refused to correct. The discovery was made by Larisa Alexandrovna, Raw Story's Managing News Editor, and John Byrne, Raw Story's Executive Editor.

<snip>
Raw Story had requested a correction from the AP late last week. Katherine Shrader, the AP national security correspondent who authored the article, told us she had spoken with her editor and that no correction would be made.

"I've talked it over with our bureau chief and we're not going to be doing that," Shrader said.

<snip>

"Raw Story then spoke with Stokes, AP’s Director of Media Relations. Stokes took careful notes regarding our concerns and said he would investigate our claims. He found that the AP had, indeed, gotten our article from "human rights groups" but that it was AP policy not to credit blogs.

"It does turn out that we don't give mentions to blogs when we're researching our stories and when we've been given material by others such as in this case human rights groups that brought this stuff to us that we independently check," Stokes said in a voicemail message."


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here is the best part, now what they are saying is this:

Stokes elaborated Tuesday, saying the AP does give credit to blogs. He said the reason Raw Story wasn’t credited in the Mar. 14 article was because the bureau “hadn’t heard of” Raw Story, and because they had received the article from third-party groups. He said the agency would be issuing a statement, most likely later today.

“We do credit blogs that we know,” Stokes said. “We had no idea who you were.”

but do they attribute, nope!
Read the rest of John's article here:
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Associat...