AP's Kathleen Carroll Plays For High Stakes (as did Nixon)

Kathleen Carroll is by no means a rookie to the news business. Here’s her bio, from a International Women’s Media Foundation forum she participated in.

Kathleen Carroll has been executive editor of the Associated Press since July 2002. She is the wire service’s senior news executive. She returned to the AP after having served as Washington, DC bureau chief for Knight Ridder since 1999.

Carroll first joined the AP in 1978 in Dallas and later held editing positions in the Newark, N.J., Los Angeles and Washington, DC bureaus. Earlier, she was a reporter for The Dallas Morning News and an editor for the International Herald Tribune and the San Jose Mercury News.

Carroll has served on the readership committee and the craft development committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and is currently on the executive committee of the Associated Press Managing Editors.

In a March 2006 report at Poynter Online, Kathleen Carroll said:

It's clear that people want and need information about the world -- from their neighborhoods to communities across the state, country and globe. So if the AP gives them reliable information and the context to understand it... if we deliver it in all kinds of formats -- text, photos, video, sound, maps, interactives -- and make it available through newspapers, computers, mobile phones or other devices... then we'll succeed.

So, when Carroll vehemently affirms the Associated Press story of six Sunnis set afire, one might venture both that she knows whereof she speaks (although having scant apparent foreign or war reporting experience) and that she carries the reputation of the AP on her words.

In Carroll’s latest repetitive defense statement, she says (well pretty much what she said before):

Their [critics] assertions that the AP has been duped or worse are unfounded and just plain wrong.

No organization has done more to try to shed light on what happened Nov. 24 in the Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad than The Associated Press.

We have sent journalists to the neighborhood three different times to talk with people there about what happened. And those residents have repeatedly told us, in some detail, that Shiite militiamen dragged six Sunni worshippers from a mosque, drenched them with kerosene and burned them alive.

No one else has said they have actually gone to the neighborhood. Particularly not the individuals who have criticized our journalism with such barbed certitude.

The AP has been transparent and fair since the first day of our reporting on this issue.

We have not ignored the questions about our work raised by the U.S. military and later, by the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Indeed, we published those questions while also sending AP journalists back out to the scene to dig further into what happened and why others might be questioning the initial accounts.

The AP mission was to get at the facts, wherever those facts took us.

Carroll, however, dissembles. Where is the transparency, where are the facts? The AP's search for truth hasn't taken it very far.

The AP won’t produce its star source, Jamil Hussein, the policeman that neither the Iraqi Ministry of Interior nor CENTCOM can find record of, any of the immolated bodies or their names, the names and credentials of the local Iraqis the AP used as reporters of the incident and the AP’s follow-up, the purported conveniently located afterward anonymous witnesses, nor any Sunni leaders who are aware of the claimed incident.

Kathleen Carroll has experience, yes. And, Richard Nixon was an experienced politician. Leading Republicans, finally, told him the gig was up, the cover-up had doomed his credibility and position. Where are the responsible media leaders who will tell Ms. Carroll?

ALSO see, ponder, hmmm!, “John Kerry had more credibility than the AP!”