AP also distributed this photographic comparison of the original and the doctored image:

And here’s a related correction from the Waterloo Region Record in Canada. It published the doctored photo:

The Associated Press distributed a picture showing the mayor of Vilnus, Lithuania, riding in an armoured personnel carrier and flattening a car on a downtown street to dramatize an anti-parking campaign. Upon learning the photo had been doctored by the mayors office to remove other people on the tank, the news service withdrew the photo from its system and archives. The Record ran this photo in the news section on August 4.

*Correction August 22, 2011: The original headline on this post was “AP retracts photo of car crushing mayor.” As pointed out in an error report on MediaBugs, the lack of hyphen “makes it sound as though a car is crushing the mayor, not the other way around.” True. I added the hyphen, and I regret the error.

The original version of this column stated the Daily Beast used iThenticate to check Gerald Posner’s articles for plagiarism. Robert Creutz says he is unaware of the specific nature of the material the Beast was checking with the service. The lead has be changed to reflect this. A quote from him also suggested he had contacted the Beast to recommend they move to the subscription option, but Creutz says he was speaking in general and did not make a recommendation. The quote has been corrected. Finally, Associated Content was cited as an iThenticate customer. Creutz says his references to Associated Content were in the context of noting that the company is similar to Demand Media. He did not mean to imply that they were a customer. We regret the errors.

My book corrections are here. My most recent previous correction is online here.

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.

Thanks, Steve!

Sources of Error

He spoke with a polished English accent, once shared a crème brûlée torte with Hillary Clinton, and spent part of the summer officiating tennis at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Charles Carlson gave every indication that he was a student worth watching at the University of Minnesota when he sat down for an interview with the Minnesota Daily, a student newspaper, during the Democratic National Convention in August. Carlson was an at-large delegate at the convention. He later announced his candidacy for the Minneapolis City Council.
“He was a Beijing Olympics tennis official and is a University graduate student, GLBT rights advocate and director of operations at a Minneapolis architecture firm,” read the Daily’s story about him. “Is there anything Charles Carlson doesn’t do?”
This week the paper answered its own question: tell the truth. An investigation published on Monday by the Daily revealed that Carlson had lied about many of his achievements.
There was no communal torting with Hillary, and he didn’t officiate at the Olympics. Carlson grew up and went to school in Minnesota, which meant his transcripts from Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton University and two schools in England were forged. When confronted with the evidence, he admitted that he suffers from a mental illness for which he was once institutionalized. The English accent disappeared, too.
“I spent six years being a gay nothing that people just made fun of, and then when I was discharged I found out that people would believe anything you told them,” he told the Daily.
Carlson is far from alone in discovering that members of the public and journalists, be they student reporters or veteran scribes, will often take the facts at face value. An old saying in journalism holds that, “If your grandmother tells you she loves you, check it out.” It’s good advice, but rarely followed…