Following up on an item posted yesterday -- 48 hours after it issued an order to subscribing publications and outlets to "kill" a story it filed on Sunday ("Sen. Paul: Voters want to round up immigrants") claiming that Kentucky Republican Senator Rand "sees voters wanting, quote, 'somebody who wants to round people up, put in camps and send them back to Mexico,'" the story is still present on web -- at several sites whose URL begins with hosted2.ap.org. These are sites belonging to AP itself. Additionally, the story is still present at the widely read Yahoo.com.
Specifics follow the jump:
As of 1:30 this afternoon, the following "hosted2.ap.org" web addresses carried the story:
- Dallas Morning News
- The Southern California-based Inland Enterprise
- A hosted2.ap.org site ("http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/") which only carries the AP logo, indicating that it's the wire service's own web page.
The story is also still at Yahoo.com.
The longer this goes on the more reasonable it becomes to begin questioning whether the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, really intends to completely kill the story it ran on Sunday afternoon, or whether it really wants to keep a few copies of it opportunistically hanging around for 2016 or 2020. After all, it would be really convenient if an opponent of Paul could conduct a whisper campaign by referring to this piece -- especially if Paul becomes vulnerable at reelection time or is involved the 2016 or 2020 presidential race. Additionally, the longer it hangs around, the more likely it may be that webarchive.org may capture it.
The fact that the story still exists, especially at AP.org addresses, is far beyond inexcusable. And am I really supposed to believe that the wire service would equally as negligent (or possibly conniving) if it had totally blown a story about a Democrat or leftist?
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
