Associated Press, not one to bother with facts

Okay, last post of the evening on this story, but hey, I just have to point out what I wrote at 2:15 pm PST:

"The Associated Press (2 hours ago):
"dog-sitting the 1-year-old pit bull for a friend" <--- will be interesting to see if this is the article most picked up by other news agencies."

And lo and behold - how many of the 222 articles are the AP article in which the age of the dog is incorrect by like eight months? One hundred and seventy five. That's a whopping 78% of the total number of articles which include the incorrect age. Sure, in other cases, the difference in age would be negligible, a tangent, unimportant - say the difference between a 2-yr-old and a 5-yr-old dog. In this case, it's a pretty glaring oversight. A 12 week old puppy is much different in size, physical and mental maturity than a 1-yr-old dog. At the very least, a 12-week old puppy is teething and more prone to chew on things than, say, a juvenile dog with an adult set of teeth.

The AP article is making its way through international papers, globetrotting at a moderate clip all with really inaccurate information.

And this isn't something you can just call up an author about and ask that a retraction on page 15 be issued - it's done, it's out there and by the end of the day, a story about a negligent parent who self-medicates instead of cares for her 4-mos old infant and who leave him alone with a teething puppy becomes a story about an adult pit bull eating a child. That is what people will remember.

Forgotten is the child. Forgotten is the idiot who decided to take drugs instead of be a responsible parent. Forgotten is human beings who are clearly unfit to be responsible parents at this point in their lives, let alone dog savvy enough to dog-sit for their felon friend. Most of all, forgotten is that puppy (magically transformed into a ravenous adult fiend of a dog) who did what puppies do and who is fast becoming, instead, a lighting rod for breedists everywhere.