The Associated Press recently came under fire when a Community Note on X forced it to issue a retraction on a story about JD Vance. Subsequently, conservatives railed against the outlet as an example of the mainstream media’s rampant bias against the Trump-Vance campaign and the broader conservative movement.
Not the Bee shared screenshots on X of the first headline released by the Associated Press which read, “JD Vance says school shootings are a “fact of life,” calls for better security.” After this initial headline made Vance seem dismissive of school shootings, the story was hit with a community note, compelling the AP to publish a title with additional context.
The update read, “JD Vance says he laments that school shootings are a “fact of life” and says that the U.S. needs to harden security to prevent more carnage like the shooting this week that left four dead in Georgia,” indicating that Vance’s comments were taken out of context in a misleading way in the prior headline. The AP noted, “This post replaces and earlier post that was deleted to add context to the partial quote from Vance.”
Not the Bee commented on the retraction from the Associated Press, writing, “You don’t hate the media enough. And this retraction is happening primarily because the AP was about to get nuked by a Community Note. The media is held accountable by 𝕏 and almost nobody else.” Users echoed a similar sentiment in the comments section, blasting the misleading headline.
One user said, “Also note that the first headline is short enough for people to get the point in one glance. The corrected one you have to read through and parse to get the clarification. They cheat even when they apologize.” Another person wrote, “Amazing: as a journalism major, I used to look to the AP as an unbiased source of authoritative information. These days, I harass them for their insanely hyper-partisan, Pravda-level propaganda, and they delete their posts! I give them an F-minus.” He added in another post, “Congratulations, AP: you have become the chief source of fake news, misinformation, and propaganda.”
“@AP is playing the usual games to help the Democrats. Step 1: Lie to make a conservative look bad (in this case, @JDVance) and get millions of impressions. Step 2: Issue a correction virtually no one sees. @X needs a new rule, @elonmusk. When a media outlet pulls a stunt like this, it loses any checkmarks across all accounts it operates until the correction accrues as many impressions as the lie did at the moment the correction was posted. Call it the Vance Rule,” another user pointed out.
One person commented, “I don’t think ‘accountable’ is quite right here, because the right thing for the AP to do is make a retraction or correction as visible as possible, and a Community Note is not written by the guilty party anyway. Another added, “It would be meaningful if the @X algorithm sent the correction/community note to everyone who say the original. That might discourage lying if folks knew they would be exposed.”
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