AP Makes Friday Night Katrina Correction

Now that it's Friday night and people won't be paying so much attention, the Associated Press has seen fit to finally release a correction to part of their Katrina video story, clarifying that the President was warned about overtopping the levees, not breaching: "The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking."

There's a huge difference in the two terms, and despite this clarification, the Associated Press has probably done the President some damage. It seems to me that the AP willfully ignored the actual facts for as long as possible in order to inflict maximum damage on the Bush administration.

In its correction the AP still refers to the video as "confidential," despite the fact the video has been widely available to the news media and is not a "new" discovery.

Update: John Hinderaker at Power Line notes: "I think this highlights, though, how hard it is for truth to catch up to error... The correction (or 'clarification') will never catch up to most of the tens of millions of people who heard the original story. The news business is all about impressions, and corrections, days after the fact, never take away the impression that the original story falsely created."

Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters: "After its report got picked up by every news source in the US, and after the discovery that these transcripts and videos never contained any warnings about breaches, the AP has finally decided to actually read the transcript and watch its video... This vaunted system of editors and fact-checking at Exempt Media outlets failed yet again, and yet again the hack job that emerged was intended to damage George Bush."

Saturday Morning Update: Welcome to readers of RightWinged.com and Gina Cobb.