There is an ex-Marine named Jimmy Massey.  A sad case really.  He was discharged for depression and Post trumatic stress disorder.  After his discharge, he tried pulling a Kerry, and indeed the AP, source for 8,500 newpapers, ran 3 stories on his allegations without checking any sources.  Including their own!

But none of the AP reporters ever called Ravi Nessman, an Associated Press reporter who was embedded with Massey's unit. Nessman wrote more than 30 stories about the unit from the beginning of the war until April 15, after Baghdad had fallen.

The stories were about alleged atrocities that the Marines had committed in Iraq.  And not one of the reporters reporting it bothered to check to see if any of it was true! And indeed, none of it was!

The AP is trying to weasel out of this disaster by saying they were just reporting what he was saying, but 2 of the most renowned, and hardly conservative, Journalist professors in the nation call that hog wash!

Phillip Dixon, former managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and currently chairman of the Howard University Department of Journalism and Michael Parks, director of the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalism and formerly the editor of the Los Angeles Times both lambasted the AP saying in effect that it is a reporters DUTY to check the facts.  Not become a glorified stenographer!

Yet the AP reported it, and the likes of anti war protestors bought it for the simple reason that it made the military, and by extension, America look bad.

And these are the publications we are supposed to accept as "facts" when they say something?

I have said it many times before, but it bears repeating.  When hate is your only motiviation, you actions cease to become rational and sane.  So you will beleive anything that fits into your hate regardless of how suspect it is.

In this case, the AP has a damn lot of explaining todo, since they had to go no further than their own staff to learn that the stories were false!  Instead, like a little toady for the rabid America hating crowd, they became liars themselves.  It is going to be hard to take any negative story they regurgitate now and believe it with out questioning the source.

AP, Join CBS and the BBC.  You are all a waste of time and paper.