AP kills NOLA bridge shooting incident

the other day, i mentioned a story over at Why Are We Back In Iraq about the shooting of some people on a bridge in nola. make sure you go read it.

who knows what happened in that story - but an interesting substory is that the curtain was pulled back on the media machinations.

sez ron:

"A warning about the story seems to have been accidentally posted on a Western New York NBC affiliate Website, WSTM, at approximately 6:30 PM eastern.

The warning reads:

"Stations: The latest New Orleans-datelined urgent series Hurricane Katrina-Shootings has been KILLED. The Army Corps of Engineers says the contractors were shot at, then police fatally shot the gunman who'd fired on the contractors. The contractors were NOT killed."

"A kill is mandatory. Make certain the story is not broadcast."

"A sub will be filed shortly."

"AP Broadcast News Center - Washington."

Ron also got a screen grab of the warning/redaction here in case it gets pulled - but it seems that the 'kill' story was maybe supposed to go to AP subscribers on some 'private' channel, but it appears that it went out on their normal feed - google has a list of other sites which are still publishing the "kill" demand, although they seem to have been wiped from news.google.

Ron actually mentioned that "The Associated Press experienced some technical difficulties early Sunday evening, which caused problems for the national and international media" - which might explain their error. i wish they'd make more mistakes so that we can peek behind the curtain more often.

its interesting to see that the The Army Corps of Engineers can demand, successfully, that a story be retracted - purely based on their word. the susbequent stories didnt mention the confusion, or the fact that there might in fact be an alternate version of events.

note the morphing of the story:
#1. "Police shot eight people carrying guns on a New Orleans bridge Sunday, killing five or six... the victims were contractors on their way to repair a canal."
#2. "the contractors were shot at, then police fatally shot the gunMAN who'd fired on the contractors"
#3. "Police shot and killed at least five people Sunday after gunmen opened fire on a group of contractors traveling across a bridge... police shot at eight people carrying guns, killing five or six"

its pretty easy to imagine what really happened, right? bastards.

i hope the NRA and MinuteMen crowds see this. according to the official version, the police killed 5 people just because they were (apparently) carrying guns. even if its true that some 'looters' shot at the contractors, there's no way the police could know who did it. and that's just wwhat the police are willing to own up to. one imagines the true horror of this story is even worse.

this is what happens when u have a shoot-to-kill policy - and give hack-police the right to carry it out without oversight.


separately, hats off to the AP for using the term "kill" about a story about killing - ive seen a couple of unfortunate analogies these past few days. there was the cnn reporter who said that relief to victimes of Lake George had to be patient - "its like a full-course meal - it takes a while" and then of course there was blinky saying "theres been a tidal wave of compassion"