Sometimes, Activism Works

Regarding the AP’s erroneous reporting of Jack Kevorkian assisting the “terminally ill,” in yesterday’s report about K’s pending parole. Stephen Drake of Not Dead Yet was on the case and seems to have gotten the AP to change the story.

“I just peeked at your article for the Weekly Standard.I made calls yesterday about the use of ‘terminally ill in the AP article. The first call was to the Michigan AP office. The news staffer said they’d already been talking about the inaccurate term in the article and that it wasn’t in the article sent out—it was inserted by the National Desk. He promised to call the national desk...

“My next call was to the national AP desk. I identified myself and repeated the complaint and told me what the Michigan office told me. I mentioned that this misinformation would ‘spread like a cancer.’ It appears to have been taken seriously—perhaps because the AP now has an official statement of standards.[Most of] the old articles are *gone*. They’ve vanished. They’ve been replaced with articles that have language that is more neutral. If you wonder why that happened, it’s because of the calls I made yesterday.”

Way to go, Stephen. Sometimes activism works.