Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Saturday, Jan. 4, 2003

Although the AP’s version, describing hundreds of gun-downed and strafed-from-the air refugees, came under challenge early (from U.S. News and World Report and Stripes.com), the biggest chink in the award-winning account appeared when the key AP source, a former soldier who claimed to have witnessed the debacle firsthand, was shown up as a fraud who was not even in the worn-torn country.

While the AP team understandably dropped the fraud’s chilling and bloody account from a later book on the same subject, they have shrugged off suggestions that the whole story has been impeached, suggesting that the liar’s tale was but a portion of the mosaic of a tale they stand by.

Part of that confidence is born from accounts gleaned by the AP reporters from Korean citizens (who have filed claims against the U.S. and South Korea) who described as many as 400 perishing: 300 refugees under the bridge at No Gun Ri and 100 more in a strafing run by U.S. planes. The AP reporters also rely on accounts from other interviewed American soldiers, who they report recollect as many as 200 deaths.

The story made its debut on Sept. 29, 1999, being featured in media all over the United States, including the front page of the New York Times. NBC’s Tom Brokaw also ran with the story a country mile, going so far as to take the AP’s great imposter with him to South Korea to do a teary-eyed "Dateline" show on No Gun Ri.

Many of the charges and counter-charges about the reliability of witness recollections and the like have been slung by author and historian Robert Bateman, whose controversial book on No Gun Ri emphasizes that the AP ignored and never reported that war correspondents on the ground in the area at the time, including one from the AP, never publicly or privately uttered a whisper of a suggestion of a massacre.

According to Bateman, the reporters still alive expressed to him their outrage over the original AP massacre story. Also, says Bateman, these same reporters were dismayed and surprised that nobody ever solicited them for their version before or after the story got worldwide attention.

Bateman also suggests that the AP knew or should have known of the fraud’s lie before even submitting the series to the Pulitzer Board. Be that as it may, there is another sticky point that has gone underreported.

Louis D. Boccardi, president and chief executive officer of Associated Press, recently elected chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board, served as a regular member of the board before during and after the awarding of the 2000 prize for the massacre story to the AP.

Strangely enough, such an appearance of impropriety or lack of objectivity is not the subject of any Pulitzer board rules or bylaws. Members are discouraged from voting on submissions they have never read or reviewed, but there is apparently no recusal mechanism for those who might have to struggle to keep an objective mind.

The irony in such a circumstance is magnified when one considers the original high goals and standards envisioned by the prize’s founder and patron saint of journalism, the late Joseph Pulitzer.

In the original Pulitzer will, the renowned publisher endowed Columbia University to establish its School of Journalism, reserving one-fourth of the largesse to be “applied to prizes or scholarships for the encouragement of public, service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education.”

In his history-making act, Pulitzer stated: “I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people. I desire to assist in attracting to this profession young men of character and ability, also to help those already engaged in the profession to acquire the highest moral and intellectual training.”

Meanwhile, U.S. News & World Report has not given up the fight. In a recent commentary, the publication pondered that it “cannot imagine how AP can avoid returning the Pulitzer, just as the Washington Post did some years ago when its prize-winning reporter was revealed to have written fiction instead of fact.”

Bateman remains adamant as well. As a military man and former member of the 7th U.S. Calvary (the unit allegedly involved in the massacre), he has never been anxious to have the stain of No Gun Ri remain on the shield of his fellow warriors. His attack, however, has been the measured one of a historian:

"I believe that the accounts of the South Koreans are a collage of several different events that occurred at several different places over the course of a few days. And in fact, American troops had mistakenly fired on a large group of refugees accompanied by friendly Republic of Korea forces only a day or two earlier, in another nearby area, thinking they were the vanguard of a North Korean advance.”

Bateman suggests that the AP story would not have been earthshaking news, much less worthy of the Pulitzer Prize, unless the death toll of the No Gun Ri incident was magnified to “massacre” proportions and later supposedly covered up by the U.S. government.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Media Bias
Editor's note:
"Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism"