Two and a half weeks later, the Associated Press has gotten around to deleting a tweet that misrepresented the AP’s own reporting, which was heavily slanted to begin with. The AP’s story drew a questionable distinction between Hillary Clinton’s meetings with government officials and meetings with heads of non-governmental organizations in order to claim that donors to the Clinton Foundation were a bigger part of her meeting schedule than they actually were. Then the article was tweeted out without even the partial context it eventually got around to providing, leading to a blatantly false tweet, and the AP refused to correct the record. Until now.
The tweet omitted the important distinction between discretionary meetings and official meetings. It read:
BREAKING: AP analysis: More than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation.
It now will be replaced by a tweet that says:
AP review: Many of the discretionary meetings Clinton had at State were with people who gave to Clinton Foundation. apne.ws/...
The delete-and-replace comes with a wholesale reconsideration of how the AP will handle deleting and correcting misleading or mistaken tweets. But note that “discretionary meetings” language—the AP is pointedly standing by part of what was wrong with its story to begin with. The secretary of state doesn’t only meet with government officials, and many meetings with government officials are discretionary. It’s not like the secretary just goes ahead and meets with any official of any nation who puts in a request—discretion is employed there, too. And meetings with representatives of major NGOs are an important part of the job, as well, as Mark Sumner detailed at the time.
The AP has—way too late—corrected its most egregious sin by removing a flatly false tweet. But it also needs to take a hard look at the mentality that led to an article that massaged the results of an investigation into who Clinton met with until there was an implication of scandal. Pro tip, guys: When you’re using a Nobel Peace Prize-winning recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Congressional Gold Medal as an example of someone it’s scandalous to meet with, you’re trying way, way too hard to create scandal.