Raleigh blogger Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee exposed a hoax story in Iraq that was picked up by most of the major wire services. The story ran on June 28 and Bob, one of the panelists at the John Locke Foundation’s Carolina FreedomNet blog conference last October, was immediately suspicious. Using sources in Iraq, he quickly showed that the 20 beheadings alleged in these stories never took place.

Retractions came fairly quickly from all but The Associated Press. Well, the AP finally, grudgingly, one may assume, joined the others in correcting the record on July 1. As Bob says in a column today:

Wire services are only as valuable as the amount of trust readers can invest in their reporting.

As the quality and accuracy of their stories shows a marked and consistent decline, we can only attribute this decline to a failure in editorial leadership, and wonder how much further the respective Boards of Directors for these agencies will allow their reputations to slip before they see a need to replace senior leadership and re-examine their management decisions, editorial standards, and field-level accountability.