AMERICAN IDOL - A.P. ADMITS ERROR IN GOSSELIN REPORT

A.P. ADMITS ERROR IN GOSSELIN REPORT

The Associated Press on Wednesday issued a correction of a story that it had moved earlier in the day saying that Kate and Jon Gosselin had been living separate and apart for at least two years. The wire service quoted lawyers for Kate Gosselin as saying that they had only been living apart for a week or two. Earlier in the day the celebrity website TMZ, run by lawyer Harvey Levin, had explained that Kate Gosselin may have checked off an item in the divorce filing stipulating that they had been living apart for two years to "get the clock ticking" in case her husband decided to contest her claim that the marriage was irretrievably broken. Numerous websites, however, failed to correct the original error, leading Baltimore Sun TV writer David Zurawik to remark today (Thursday), "It appears that even AP, one of the bedrocks of mainstream fact-based journalism, was caught up in the Jon & Kate frenzy of getting it out there first before getting it right." (Meanwhile, it would appear that TMZ itself has been caught up in its own rush to judgment over the claim by American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert that he wrote none of the songs on a pre- Idol album due to be released this summer. "That just isn't true," TMZ said in an article today, citing what it said was an "internal memo" from Lambert's record company "which clearly lists Lambert as the co-writer on nine of the 11 tracks on the album." However, the memo, reproduced on the site, "clearly lists" only "publishing splits." It is a common practice in the music industry for performers -- and sometimes record producers and even agents and managers -- to share publishing royalties with songwriters. Even song writing credits are often fudged, as is well known in the case of the Beatles tunes credited to "John Lennon and Paul McCartney" that were written individually by one or the other.)

25/06/2009