Associated Press Retracts Rand Paul Immigration Story After Reporting the Opposite of What He Said

The Associated Press retracted a story Sunday after misreporting a quote by Senator Rand Paul.

Yesterday, Paul discussed immigration policy on Fox News Sunday, saying, “I think people want a little different face on immigration frankly. They don’t want somebody who wants to round people up, put them in camps and send them back to Mexico. They don’t want to give them welfare either.”

The Associated Press’ story, which ran with the headline “Sen. Paul: Voters want to round up immigrants,” said of Paul, “He sees some in his party favoring a 2016 presidential candidate with an immigration policy that would ‘round up people … and send them back to Mexico.’”

Jim Pinkerton thinks this story may have been “too good to check,” a phrase heard in newsrooms. “They had the chance to have a Republican saying that other Republicans were a bunch of racists and haters and immigrant-bashers. So, then in their zeal to get that story out there and hammer the GOP, they went with an inaccurate thing that they could have figured out was wrong if they’d either checked the video tape themselves or of course called Senator Paul’s office.”

Alan Colmes thinks Pinkerton’s jumping too far in suggesting that this was done to make Paul look like a radical. “They made a mistake, they put in the kill order, took the story back. What more do you want?”