This is a nice story from AP about how the news organization worked hard to correct a photo caption on an important photo:

For 68 years, John E. Love has been haunted by memories of being forced to carry the bodies of fallen comrades to a mass grave hollowed out of a Filipino rice field. Now, at last, a bit of history is being rewritten because of those memories.

After six months of research, The Associated Press this week is correcting the caption on one of the most famous photos in its library, 65 years after the image first moved on the newswire. The image shows defeated Allied soldiers after their surrender to Japanese forces on the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula in April 1942.

Over the years, the photo — which shows a procession of men walking down a dirt road, bearing bodies in blankets hung from bamboo poles — has become perhaps the most widely published image of what came to be known as the Bataan Death March.

But for many of those years, Love, a native of Albuquerque, N.M., who fought to defend Bataan as a 19-year-old Army corporal, saw captions paired with the photo that he believed did a disservice to the truth.

Last August, Love picked up the Albuquerque Journal and saw the photo again, together with a front-page story about Bataan survivors. He called the newspaper and told an editor the caption was wrong. It described the scene as part of the infamous Death March, a forced six-day march by Japanese captors of 12,000 Americans and more than 66,000 Filipino prisoners across the peninsula. Thousands died in the march, suffering from lack of food, water and medical treatment.

“That picture is not of the Death March,” says Love, now 87. “The Japanese would not have tolerated a bunch of slow marching guys carrying their own dead. They wouldn’t have tolerated it just one New York minute.”

A Journal reporter, Charles D. Brunt, found other local Bataan survivors who agreed, wrote a story about the conflicting information and contacted AP, the source of both the photo and the caption. That launched the cooperative’s own investigation of the photo, originally supplied to news services by the U.S. military after it was confiscated from defeated Japanese forces.

Deep in the AP library of millions of photos, the caption filed with a negative in 1945 identified the image as showing U.S. and Filipino forces carrying war casualties as they neared the end of the death march and approached Camp O’Donnell, where prisoners of war were held.

AP archivists contacted the Pentagon. Eventually, that led to the original photograph, on file in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The catalog recorded it as a photo of American prisoners using improvised litters to carry comrades. But a note filed along with the image, date unknown, said that, according to a retired U.S. Army colonel, the photo was not of the death march, but of the burial detail in the weeks that followed.

That’s exactly the way Love had long recalled it.

“We rounded up bamboo poles … and we confiscated what blankets we could from the incoming prisoners. We told them we had to have them. The guys were dying faster than we could dig graves or carry them,” Love said. “We carried them 1,000 yards and we would just unload the blankets there and the guys would fall out into the graves. I did that every day until the late hours of the evening for six weeks.”

After discussing the evidence, AP decided to correct the caption. It now reads, in part, “At the time of its release, this photo was identified as dead and wounded being carried by fellow prisoners during the Bataan Death March in April 1942 … Subsequent information from military archivists, the National Archives and Records Administration, and surviving prisoners, strongly suggests that this photo may actually depict a burial detail at Camp O’Donnell.”

It is rare for the news service to correct the information filed with a historical photo, said Valerie Komor, director of the AP Corporate Archives. There are many images in storage, and any individual photograph is likely to be re-examined only if someone calls it into question. But that does not mean the first draft of history cannot be rewritten …

In a story March 5 about the spring flood forecast in the upper Midwest, The Associated Press reported erroneously the number of people who were forced to evacuate last March and April during flooding in North Dakota and Minnesota. State emergency officials estimate that more than 30,000 people were evacuated, not millions. Link

The Feb 1 story headlined “Backdoor taxes to hit middle class” is wrong and has been withdrawn. The story said lower-income families will pay more under tax provisions scheduled to expire Dec 31. The Obama administration’s budget calls for the extension of those tax provisions for households earning less than $250,000. There will be no substitute story. Link

More background from Gawker and Reuters’ Good, Bad and Ugly blog.

In a Jan. 25 story about a study of the gender gap in college enrollment and undergraduate degrees, The Associated Press reported erroneously that more men are attending college and graduating with a bachelor’s degree, reversing the tendency of women to outnumber men and outperform them academically. The study found that the gender gap has stopped widening. Link

In a story headlined LEWIS’ SON: ‘I BLAME MY MEAN, EVIL DAD FOR BROTHER’S DEATH’, released on 7 January (10), WENN suggests comedian Jerry Lewis may have been responsible for the death of his son, Joseph. We’d like to make it clear that this is not the case and that Joseph’s brother Gary thinks his sibling’s death last year (09) could have been prevented if he and his father had been “on better terms”. As a result, you may wish to temper the headline accordingly. WENN EDITOR

In a story contained in WENN’s fifth feed on 6 January (10), headlined ‘BEYONCE’S PRIVATE NEW YEAR CONCERT FOR GADDAFI’S SON’, WENN erroneously reported a 2009 New Year’s Eve (31Dec09) Beyonce Knowles concert in St Barts was hosted by Saif Gaddafi, the son of Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s son. Mr. Gaddafi representatives have made it clear that the businessman was not part of the event and was not in St. Barts at the time. He was in Asia. WENN apologises for this unintentional error. Please correct this story on your website or in your database and accept our apologies for any inconvenience…… WENN Editor.

That’s the correction from WENN, but it’s got nothing on Gawker’s offering. Here’s an excerpt from its corrective post, “Correction: Beyonce Played NYE Show for Different Shithead Gaddafi Son”:

Tonight we received an urgent email from the PR firm representing shithead Libyan Dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam: We incorrectly reported Beyonce performed for him this New Year’s! She actually performed for Col. Gaddafi’s other shithead son, Hannibal.

It continued:

… Col. Gadaffi is in fact a ranting, terrorist-backing shithead of truly staggering proportions. It is as if God literally took a pile of shit, fashioned it into the shape of a head, placed it gingerly on the neck of Muammar al-Gaddafi, then let him run a good-sized country using only the worm-addled brain contained therein. Not a “perception”: A cold, hard, metaphorical fact.

The post ends by listing the “the amazing amount of shitheaded things 33 year-old Hannibal (nee Moutassim) Gadaffi has done in his short, useless life.”

Wow.

In some versions of a Dec. 29 story about a Supreme Court ruling on highway usage, The Associated Press erroneously reported that Israel has a network of roads reserved for Jews. These roads are open to all Israeli citizens, including Arabs, as well as foreigners and tourists, while banning virtually all Palestinians. Link

In a Dec. 28 story, The Associated Press, relying on information from Van Morrison’s Hollywood-based publicist and his official Web site, reported erroneously that the Irish singer had a new baby boy with a woman identified as “his wife, GiGi.”
Morrison said Thursday in a statement through his Dublin public relations firm that the report was “utterly without foundation” and planted by an unknown hacker. Morrison said he remains “very happily married” to former Miss Ireland Michelle Rocha, with whom he has two children, aged 3 and 2.
An e-mail sent to the AP on Thursday by the office of Morrison’s Hollywood publicist, Phil Lobel, said the publicist’s Dec. 28 announcement of the birth was based on information from Morrison’s hacked Web site and that “all those with Van Morrison regret any confusion this may have caused.”
Morrison’s statement, issued by the Dublin branch of the U.S.-based public relations firm Fleishman-Hillard Inc., said his Web site has been hacked at least twice in recent months. The statement was issued by John Saunders, senior partner of the firm in Europe, who confirmed to the AP the authenticity of Thursday’s statement. Link

Thanks, Steve!

A photo of Arindam Ghosh, a vice president at consulting firm Analysis Group, appeared with a Wednesday article about the Galleon insider-trading case. Because of incorrect information provided by Bloomberg News, Mr. Ghosh was misidentified as Intel Corp. executive Rajiv Goel, a defendant in the Galleon case. Link

In a Dec. 17 story about a restaurant called Ganja Gourmet, The Associated Press misidentified the owner. The owner’s name is Steve Horwitz, not Scott Horowitz. Link

As noted by its Good, Bad, and Ugly blog, Reuters had an unfortunate boy/buoy typo in a recent story. The incorrect text made it onto many websites, including the New York Times (note the last graf):

The corrected version of the story was sent with this correction:

Corrects reference in paragraph six to read “buoy” rather than “boy”.

In a Nov. 17 story about job cuts at Verizon Communications Inc., The Associated Press, relying on a labor union report, erroneously reported that Verizon is laying off more than 1,000 employees in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia.
In response to AP’s query, a Verizon spokesman on Tuesday confirmed that layoffs were occurring. On Wednesday, the spokesman said Verizon has a “surplus” of employees in the area and is giving people a chance to leave voluntarily through buyouts. The spokesman said layoffs could follow if necessary. Link

In a Nov. 6 story citing examples of companies that changed their names to repair their images, The Associated Press erroneously reported that Accenture changed its name from Arthur Andersen as a result of an association with the Enron scandal. Accenture, previously known as Andersen Consulting, operated independently from Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm. Andersen Consulting changed its name before the Enron scandal became public and was in no way tied to the scandal. Link

Correction: An Associated Press story on the Nation page on Oct. 23 mischaracterized a motorized chair a Minnesota man was operating while drunk. Police in Proctor, Minn., where the recliner will be auctioned, said the brand is not La-Z-Boy. Link

An Associated Press image of fall foliage amid snow in Twin Mountain, N.H., published in Thursday’s Photos of the Day had been digitally altered by the photo service. The photo has been replaced with the actual, unaltered image. Link