A freelance journalist is accusing the Associated Press of stealing his story about a flight-school manager who warned the FAA in early 2001 of a student who turned out to be a suspected Sept. 11 hijacker, the Baltimore Sun reported.
Eric Longabardi, 38, claims he approached the AP’s Washington bureau with his scoop in May 2002, presenting himself as a journalist.
The AP insists he came to them as a source, according to the Sun.
Longabardi discovered that Peggy Chevrette, a flight-school manager in Arizona, warned an FAA inspector three times about Hani Hanjour, who later was suspected of being the pilot who crashed a jetliner into the Pentagon. Chevrette’s firm was teaching Hanjour to fly Boeing 737s, and she suspected his legitimacy because of his limited English and the inability to fly small aircraft, which is required to earn a commercial license, the Baltimore paper said.
WorldNetDaily has had its own battle with the Associated Press’s D.C. bureau over credit for stories.
As noted by the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web, last year, WND reported “well ahead of the Associated Press” that, according to a Justice Department memo, Attorney General John Ashcroft had decided to subject “certain nonimmigrant aliens” who are citizens of countries such as Saudi Arabia to “special registration,” including fingerprinting and tracking.
WorldNetDaily published the exclusive story on Sept. 19, 2002, but the Associated Press gave WND no credit when it came out with its own story four days later, effectively claiming the scoop as its own.
WND’s Washington bureau chief Paul Sperry e-mailed his story and the memo to AP writer Suzanne Gamboa, assuming that if she used the information it would be credited properly.
Nowhere in the story is WND credited, however, even though the information in AP’s story is virtually identical to that in WND’s copyrighted article.
As a result, the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Newsday, Miami Herald and scores of other newspapers across the country credited AP with a WorldNetDaily scoop.
More recently, the Associated Press D.C. bureau published a story on the June 18 resignation of Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose that included, without attribution, details first disclosed in a series of WND stories that began more than two months earlier.
On June 10, WND’s Sperry reported Moose’s defiant campaign to cash in on fame he gained from leading the Beltway sniper case was hurting police morale.
The AP obviously is aware of WND, having credited the news agency with several scoops, including the Internet pornography scandal in the Clinton White House, involving the downloading by White House staffers of massive amounts of hard-core porn video files.
Pitching a story
Longabardi says in May 2002 he approached the AP’s assistant Washington bureau chief, John Solomon, asking to be hired to team up for a story on Chevrette’s warnings, the Sun said.
Solomon explained the AP did not hire contract reporters and also did not give bylines to outsiders, Longabardi recalls.
Finally, Longabardi says, he asked for a citation in the story crediting him with uncovering Chevrette’s warning. Several days later, however, on May 10, the AP ran a story with Solomon’s byline giving details of the warning without any mention of Longabardi.
The AP story was picked up by major news providers, including the Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Dallas Morning News, CBS Evening News and the Fox News Channel.
The Baltimore daily said Solomon referred a call asking for comment to the AP’s corporate communications office but insisted Longabardi had misrepresented their exchanges.
Jack Stokes, a senior AP spokesman, says Longabardi approached the AP not as a journalist, but as a voluntary source of information.
“This was not a collaborative journalistic project,” Stokes told the Sun. “This was something given freely by someone acting as a source. We do get information from every possible venue and source that you can think of. Then, it’s up to us to check it out.”
Longabardi says that is nonsense, insisting as a working reporter, he was the one who learned of Chevrette’s existence, tracked her down, and provided her name to the AP.
“I don’t trust anybody in this business anymore,” he said.
