The Associated Press has withdrawn the 12th and 13th Ld-Writethrus of its story about the Natalie Wood investigation. The story quoted Christopher Walken telling Washington, D.C. sports talk radio station ESPN980 about his recollections from the night that Wood died. The station now says that it was a hoax involving a station employee who was impersonating Walken.

That employee impersonates Walken on a weekly basis*, meaning there was no intent to deceive. A report from TBD offers some background:

Marc Sterne, who goes by Nigel on ESPN 980′s The Tony Kornheiser Show, impersonates Christopher Walken on the program every week. When he did so this morning, and made up details about Natalie Wood’s drowning death in 1981 (at which the real Walken was present), an Associated Press reporter believed what he was hearing and the wire service published a report about it.

*Correction November 21, 2011: This post originally misspelled Walken as Walkin. Twice. A very lazy error on my part. Thanks to Rogerogreen for spotting the mistakes.

On Wednesday, October 5, the Evening Times published a report outlining the account of a woman s ordeal in court in which she claimed she had been raped.
This story was subsequently highlighted in Holyrood at First Minister’s Questions.
Regrettably the story was not subjected to the normal scrutiny or checks it should have received before publication in the Evening Times and we are unable to confirm details of the case.
The Crown Office has informed us that it has been unable to identify any rape trial for an attack in Glasgow which resulted in acquittal this year and which matches the details as reported.
The reporting of such cases is highly sensitive and we deeply regret any hurt or offence our reporting may have caused.

The story reported details of a rape case that the prosecutors office says never occured. Allmediascotland.com offered additional details about the offending story:

The story featured an alleged victim of a rape who is quoted saying the subsequent trial felt like “being raped all over again”. Accompanied by a sensitive feature inside the paper about a rape crisis service, the story was debated at last week’s First Minister’s Questions, with Alex Salmond agreeing to look into the case, responding to a call from Scottish Labour’s Johann Lamont.

The alleged victim of the rape is said to have attempted suicide three times, the supposed trial including her having to hold up her underwear.

But the veracity of the story was thrown into doubt when the Crown Office issued a note to newspaper editors saying they had no knowledge of a case taking place that included the details being referred to.

The paper is also dealing with criticism from Sandy Brindley of Rape Crisis Scotland:

“It is very regrettable to see a fabricated account of a rape trial being printed. Our main concern is that the story has not deterred anyone who has experienced rape or sexual abuse from reporting to the police.

“Just as damaging, however, in our opinion as the actual story is the wording of the retraction printed by the Evening Times. Unfortunately, despite years of awareness raising efforts by organisations like ours, many people still believe that women routinely lie about being raped.

“However this story came about – and its origins are very unclear – the Evening Times has perpetuated the myth that women can’t be trusted when they speak out about being raped. That’s the last thing anyone interested in justice for rape survivors needs.”

Related post here.

Although the essay was published in good faith, we now accept that the “Order” in question is in fact a forgery, and that Prince Nayef did not issue any such order. We apologise sincerely to Prince Nayef for the damage and embarrassment which our reporting of it has caused him. Link

The Independent issued a correction for the same article back in May. The difference is this week’s correction includes an apology. The previous offering simply cited a denial from the prince.

The BBC, which covered the fake news, published a report today revealing the hoax:

The story was reported by many high profile organisations including CNN, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and Forbes.
Questions about the authenticity of the story were raised by readers of the BBC website who established that the company which put out the research – ApTiquant – appeared to have only set up its website in the past month.
Thumbnail images of the firm’s staff on the website also matched those on the site of French research company Central Test, although many of the names had been changed.
The BBC contacted Central Test who confirmed that they had been made aware of the copy but had no knowledge of ApTiquant or its activities.

Wired.com did a good job highlighting some of the red flags that should have warned journalists off the story:

• AptiQuant had no footprint, no history of past studies of either intelligence or technology, despite claiming to have been a “world leader in the field of online psychometric testing” since 2006;
• The assessment tool was a free online IQ test delivered through search engine ads. This might be a valid methodology for generating spammy pop-ups, but not scientific study. (Snarky aside: we’re supposed to believe that Opera users clicking these ads have an average “superior intelligence” IQ of 125?)
• AptiQuant’s mailing address (if deliverable) would be in the middle of an intersection in downtown Vancouver.
• This paragraph:

The study showed a substantial relationship between an individual’s cognitive ability and their choice of web browser. From the test results, it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers. This hypothesis can be extended to any software in general, however more research is needed for that, which is a potential future work as an extension to this report.

The fake company’s website now carries this message:

AptiQuant was set up in late July 2011 by comparison shopping website AtCheap.com, in order to launch a fake “study” called “Intelligent Quotient and Browser Usage.” The study claimed that people using Internet Explorer have a below than average IQ score. The study took the IT world by storm. The main purpose behind this hoax was to create awareness about the incompatibilities of IE6, and not to insult or hurt anyone.

Several media outlets published posts admitting they were fooled: Gawker, The Atlantic and NPR.

Strange (and unhelpful) that AP doesn’t cite the name of the hoax blog or the fake blogger (Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari). Related corrections from the Guardian here.

For those who haven’t followed this saga, the blog A Gay Girl in Damascus was recently revealed to have been a hoax. Rather than being written by Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, a lesbian Syrian, it was authored by Tom MacMaster, an American man studying in Scotland. Some background from the Guardian:

The blog A Gay Girl in Damascus was launched in February, purportedly to explain “what it’s like to be a lesbian here”, and gathered a growing following as Syria’s popular uprising gained momentum in recent months. Amina described participating in street protests, carrying out furtive lesbian romances and eventually being forced into hiding after security forces came to her home to arrest her.

Then, on 6 June, a post appeared in the name of Amina’s cousin “Rania O Ismail”, who said the blogger had been snatched by armed men on a Damascus street. The news sparked internet campaigns to release her, until activists in Syria and beyond began voicing doubts.

It emerged that no one, even a woman in Canada who believed she was having a relationship with Amina, had ever spoken to her, and other key details could not be corroborated.

Much like the above correction, the Guardian piece about the hoax also had a photo correction:

The photograph on this article was changed on Monday 13 June because a positively verified picture of Tom MacMaster was not available.

The photo error about Amina was much worse, however. The Guardian’s reader’s editor explained what happened:

At around 4pm on Tuesday afternoon a call came in to the Guardian from a distraught young woman, Jelena Lecic, an administrator with the Royal College of Physicians in London. It was her picture, she said, not that of Amina Abdallah. She called again an hour later wanting to know why the Guardian hadn’t taken the photograph down. At this point, the Guardian had not seen any pictures of Jelena for comparison and feared – wrongly – that this might be an attempt to undermine the “real” Amina Abdallah. The Guardian also received a call from a friend of Jelena, who told us the picture was of Jelena, not Amina. She referred us to a Facebook page to prove this, but it couldn’t be opened.

Jelena called the Press Complaints Commission at around 5pm to complain about the publication of the photograph. The PCC telephoned the Guardian soon after, and by 6.45pm the picture had been removed. Within minutes it was replaced by the first photograph supplied by Amina four weeks earlier. There was a – misplaced – certainty that the original photograph was of Amina. She had sent it to us and it was also on a web page campaigning to have her released. This convinced the Guardian that we had the right person, and so that original photograph was published in Wednesday’s paper. But we were wrong. A year ago Jelena Lecic was called by a friend who told her that dozens of pictures of her were on Facebook, purporting to be of Amina Abdallah. Jelena reported this to Facebook and the next time she checked that page it was blocked, according to Julius Just, the publicist now representing Jelena.

The Guardian did not remove all the pictures until 6pm on Wednesday 8 June, 27 hours after Jelena Lecic first called the Guardian. It took too long for this to happen, for which we should apologise (see today’s Corrections and clarifications). The mitigating factors are that we first acted within four hours but compounded the error by putting up another wrong picture, albeit one that had been up on our website for a month, was unchallenged and was thought to have come directly from “Amina”. We know for a fact that the two pictures are of Jelena Lecic, but we didn’t know much else until Sunday evening. But we do know that when using social media – as we will continue to do as part of our journalism – the Guardian will have to redouble its efforts in establishing not just methods of verification, but of signalling to the reader the level of verification we think we can reasonably claim.

Update June 13: I just came accross this related piece of craziness, via Gawker:

In the wake of yesterday’s revelation that Syrian lesbian blogger Amina Arraf was actually married American grad student Tom MacMaster, another lesbian blogger—the editor who first gave “Arraf” her platform—admitted to being a married man in Ohio.

Elizabeth Frock and Melissa Bell, the Washington Post reporters who helped break the Amina Arraf/Tom MacMasters story, came up with another bombshell just one day later: Paula Brooks, the editor of lesbian news site LezGetReal, is actually “retired Ohio military man and construction worker” Bill Graber, a 58-year-old who used his wife’s name to found and run the site …

GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt has informed the Obama administration that the company will be gifting its entire 2010 tax refund, worth $3.2 Billion, to the US Treasury on April 18, Tax Day, and will furthermore adopt a host of new policies that secure its position as a leader in corporate social responsibility.

“We want the public to know that we’ve heard them, and that we know many Americans are going through tough times,” said GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt. “GE will therefore give our 2010 tax refund back to the public and allow the public to decide how to spend it.”

Immelt acknowledged no wrongdoing. “All seven of our foreign tax havens are entirely legal,” Immelt noted. “But Americans have made it clear that they deplore laws that enable tax avoidance. While we owe it to our shareholders to use every legal loophole to maximize returns – we also owe something to the American people. We didn't write the laws that let us legally avoid paying taxes. Congress did. But we benefit from those laws, and now we'd like to share those benefits. We are proud to be giving something back to America, and we are proud to set an example for all industry to follow.”

From the resulting AP story:

Facing criticism over the amount of taxes it pays, General Electric announced it will repay its entire $3.2 billion tax refund to the US Treasury on April 18.

GE uses a series of foreign tax havens that the company says are legal and that led to an enormous refund for the 2010 tax year.

The company earned $11 billion in 2010 on revenue of $150 billion.

The company, based in Fairfield, Conn., plans to phase out tax havens over 5 years and said it will create one job in the US for each new job it creates overseas.

Here's the AP note about withdrawing the story:

The Associated Press has withdrawn its story about General Electric repaying its entire $3.2 billion tax refund to the US Treasury on April 18. The story was based on a press release that GE says was a hoax.

And here's a quick look at some of the places that picked up the AP story (click for larger):

A new website promises to shine a spotlight on "churnalism" by exposing the extent to which news articles have been directly copied from press releases.

The website, churnalism.com, created by charity the Media Standards Trust, allows readers to paste press releases into a "churn engine". It then compares the text with a constantly updated database of more than 3m articles. The results, which give articles a "churn rating", show the percentage of any given article that has been reproduced from publicity material.

The Guardian was given exclusive access to churnalism.com prior to launch. It revealed how all media organisations are at times simply republishing, verbatim, material sent to them by marketing companies and campaign groups.

Meanwhile, an independent film-maker, Chris Atkins, has revealed how he duped the BBC into running an entirely fictitious story about Downing Street's new cat to coincide with the site's launch.

The director created a Facebook page in the name of a fictitious character, "Tim Sutcliffe", who claimed the cat – which came from Battersea Cats Home – had belonged to his aunt Margaret. The story appeared in the Daily Mail and Metro, before receiving a prominent slot on BBC Radio 5 Live …

– via Churnalism or news? How PRs have taken over the media, a story in the Guardian about a great project by the Media Standards Trust.

Oopsies…our bad!

On Wednesday, along with several other media outlets, UsMagazine.com erroneously published a story attributing quotes to Sarah Palin; in a supposed radio interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity, the former Republican Vice Presidential nominee was quoted bashing Christina Aguilera's botched rendition of the National Anthem at Sunday's Super Bowl.

In response, Palin, 46, set the record straight to UsMagazine.com on Thursday. "I had no interview with Sean [Hannity] and I have never bashed Christina," Alaska's former governor tells Us.

"In fact," Palin adds, "I've defended her by telling folks to back off the criticism of her mistake." (Aguilera, 30, famously flubbed the lyrics to the patriotic song while performing at Cowboys Stadium.)

Shortly after Thursday's story was published, Us learned that the Palin-Hannity interview never took place, and that the quotes were the invention of a website. We sincerely regret and apologize for the error.

Palin continued of the false report: "I was telling my kids right after her national anthem issue blew up that people needed to lay off her mistake. And then to read to that I condemned her?" Link

As Gossip Cop and Stinky Journalism have reported, the quotes were from a satirical piece on SuperTuesdayNews.com. Stinky Journalism also noted that the Us Weekly piece was also picked up by Time.

Those quotes originated from a spoof Twitter account. We apologise for any embarrassment caused to Mr Townsend, who has no connection to the @AndyDTownsend account. Link

Pakistani newspapers have admitted they were hoaxed after publishing reports based on fake Wikileaks cables containing anti-Indian propaganda.US diplomatic cables were reported on Thursday as confirming many right-wing Pakistani views and conspiracy theories about their regional arch-foe.

They claimed US envoys thought one Indian general was "rather a geek", and accused India of genocide in Kashmir.The fake cables are believed to have been planted by Pakistani intelligence.

The Guardian, a British newspaper which has all of the 250,000 leaked Wikileaks cables, said that an extensive search of the database had found nothing to match any of the claims in the Pakistani media.

– via Wikileaks: Pakistan hoaxed by bogus anti-India cables, a story on the BBC's website.