>>> On 30 April 2003, the Associated Press newswire carried the photo above and a related article headlined, "U.S. Troops Fire on Iraq Protesters Again." The story concerned the second time US forces had shot Iraqis engaged in anti-US protests, this time killing two of them and wounding 18.

Funny thing is, this article misreported the banner pictured above. As you can see, AP's own photograph shows the sentence: "Sooner or later US killers we'll kick you out." But this is how AP reported it:

"Sooner or later US killers we'll kill you," read an angry banner in English unfurled in the faces of GIs on guard in the central city.

Below is the portion as it ran on ABC News' Website. (Click here to go to the ABC News page, or click here for a mirror page on The Memory Hole.)

Let's just say that there's more than a shade of difference between "we'll kick you out" and "we'll kill you."

This article ran, most often without the photo, in dozens of news Websites around the US and the rest of the world, including USA Today, ABCNews.com, CBS News, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Sun-Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Ha'aretz (Israel), Guardian (London), Globe and Mail (Toronto), and dozens of local newspapers. There's no telling how many printed papers ran it. The screenshot below from Google News shows some of the news sites that ran the inflammatorily wrong information:

It isn't until the final version--published the next day, 01 May--that they corrected the article. By then, of course, it was too late. The first four versions of the article were already running around the world.

Another Google News search shows that as of 11:30 PM EST, 05 May, only 11 outlets had picked up the corrected story, compared to 50 for the original (wrong) versions.

For good measure, here's Agence France-Presse's photo of the banner:

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