Across US history, the AP has watched, chronicled and helped people understand a complex world

NEW YORK (AP) — Precisely 180 years ago, a handful of New York news executives looking to save money on coverage had an idea. Today, it is called The Associated Press.

Five newspaper publishers in New York City agreed in 1846 to pool resources in order to speed the delivery of news about the U.S. war with Mexico using a pony-express relay through Alabama to a telegraph office. Those beginnings gave birth to an organization that in many ways became the backbone of the news industry. The AP claims some 4 billion people, nearly half of the world’s population, see news produced by the company on a typical day.

Many don’t realize that.

For most of its history, the AP has effectively been a utility, providing material for other news outlets to print, broadcast or carry online, its journalists largely anonymous. AP reporters weren’t even identified with bylines until World War I. But the company has chronicled the nation’s big moments for much of the 250-year history of the American republic.

Although horses long since gave way to the internet, the journalism remains. Here are some stories behind the stories the AP has chronicled.

Absorbed by the message President Abraham Lincoln delivered at the Nov. 19, 1863, dedication of a cemetery at the Civil War battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania — as generations after him would be — 21-year-old AP reporter Joseph Ignatius Gilbert momentarily forgot his job.

“I unconsciously stopped taking notes,” Gilbert recalled later, “and I looked up at him as he glanced from his manuscript with a faraway look in his eyes as if appealing from the few thousands before him to the invisible audience of countless millions whom his words were to reach.”

That was a problem. There were no tape recorders or video cameras yet. So if Gilbert didn’t capture Lincoln’s words, they would reach fewer people.

Gilbert recovered, and perhaps saved his job, when the president allowed him to borrow the paper upon which he wrote the memorably short, 272-word speech, and to copy it. The reporter’s presence also insured that people would remember precisely how Lincoln delivered the address, beyond the words.

Consider Lincoln's conclusion: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Many who read the speech later put emphasis on the words “of,” “by” and “for” in his final lines. Instead, Gilbert insisted that Lincoln emphasized “the people” in each clause.

An AP correspondent scored a major scoop reporting that Germany surrendered to Allied forces in France on May 7, 1945, ending the European portion of World War II. For that, he lost his job.

Edward Kennedy was one of 17 reporters transported by the U.S. military to a former school in Reims, France, to witness the middle-of-the-night ceremony. In return for being there, the journalists agreed to keep the news secret until military censors gave the go-ahead to report it.

The journalists figured they would have to keep the secret for a few hours. Instead, they learned the “embargo” was for 36 hours and the delay had nothing to do with keeping people safe. Rather, it was to give Russian allies the time to stage a second surrender ceremony, according to Kennedy’s memoir, published in 2012.

“The absurdity of attempting to bottle up news of such magnitude was too apparent,” Kennedy wrote. “I know from experience that one might as well try to censor the rising of the sun.”

Less than 12 hours after the secret ceremony, German officials announced on a radio broadcast that they had surrendered. The broadcast originated from a French city already controlled by the Allies. To Kennedy, that meant that the same U.S. military censors that had told him to keep the news secret had authorized the Germans to make their announcement. If they hadn’t, soldiers unaware that the war was already over might have lost their lives.

Kennedy called the chief American censor to say there he couldn’t hold the news since the military had already broken its part of the deal. The censor refused to lift the embargo, but Kennedy called a story in to the AP’s London bureau, where editors knew nothing about the embargo, and a bulletin announcing the big news went out to the world.

Competitors and the military, which briefly suspended the AP’s ability to report news from Europe, were furious. The AP had the news exclusively for a day. But its bosses, under pressure, said Kennedy had been wrong to break the agreement. His AP career was over. He pressed for vindication, but it wasn’t to come before he died in a car accident in 1963.

After publication of Kennedy’s memoir, the AP apologized to his family for how he had been treated. “It was a terrible day for the AP,” the company’s then president and CEO, Tom Curley, told reporter David Caruso. “It was handled in the worst possible way.”

The importance of being on the scene, steadily and dependably, during a long-running story paid off for AP reporter Kathryn Johnson during coverage of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

On the night of April 4, 1968, Johnson was on a date in Atlanta when the car radio broke in with news that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Johnson’s companion instinctively asked if she wanted to be driven to the King family home.

She did, and arrived to see a reporter from The New York Times on the porch being told he was not welcome. The door opened, however, and the new widow Coretta Scott King saw Johnson and told the police officer guarding the home, “Let Kathryn in.”

She wasn’t a stranger. As former King aide and future U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young wrote in an introduction to Johnson’s later book, “My Time With the Kings": “Kathryn always observed scrupulously the highest standards of her profession while reporting on one of the most important continuing struggles in our country with objectivity, thoroughness and fairness.”

She spent days inside the Kings’ home, providing exclusive reports while being sensitive to what the family was going through. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis visited the home and saw Johnson helping to prepare a meal, mistaking the reporter for a white maid. Speaking in code to avoid angering some visitors who were suspicious of her presence, Johnson called an AP bureau to confirm a story she had pre-written about the expected visit.

The day after King’s murder, Johnson asked if she could have a seat on the plane that was taking the new widow to Memphis to bring his body home. Young agreed, and when other reporters protested, he told them, “Kathryn and I’ve been through the wars together.”

Incredibly, Young telephoned her boss, who told her she couldn’t go. She was needed in the office. “I’ve no doubt that had I been male, my boss would have been delighted for me to go,” she later wrote.

Johnson went on to complete a fellowship at Harvard University and returned to the AP. When she was assigned tasks like taking dictation and reporting sports scores, she left for jobs at U.S. News and World Report and CNN.

When can a the simple pressing of a wrong button inadvertently illustrate the reach of a news organization? The AP once encountered a two-word answer for that: Bob Hope.

Large news organizations frequently prepare obituaries in advance for notable public figures, so when the death occurs they can move quickly with a story that puts the person’s life and achievements in perspective.

Hope certainly merited the attention. The comedian was 95 years old on June 5, 1998, when an AP editor was doing some work on the “prep” copy. In an error, that incomplete story was inadvertently sent to thousands of news outlets and others who subscribed to the AP’s news wire. The story didn’t actually say Hope died — there were blank spaces left in the copy to fill in future details — but the format was enough to fool House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Congress was in session, and Armey asked a colleague to announce Hope’s “death” and say a few words in sympathy.

The AP’s central role in the news ecosystem was such that the false news spread with lightning speed. Another news service, Reuters, moved a bulletin saying that Hope had died, attributing it to the member of Congress, according to a Washington Post account.

Out in California, Hope was getting up, feeling good enough to go out and hit a few golf balls. His family had to set the record straight. “Some folks were a bit too quick to thank Bob Hope for the memories,” Post writer Howard Kurtz quipped, a reference to Hope’s signature song.

The comic made it past his 100th birthday before dying on July 27, 2003. Honest.

On one memorable night, the AP made a mistake and covered itself in glory by avoiding an even bigger one.

The presidential election night of 2000 won’t be forgotten by anyone involved in it. Certainly not by journalists who saw predictions of a tight race between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore come true.

Shortly after polls closed in the critical swing state of Florida, TV news networks and the AP “called” that state’s race for Gore, using a combination of exit poll results, actual votes and instinct grounded in knowledge of the state’s history. But there was an error: Gore was reported to have won one county by 42,000 votes, when the margin was actually 4,200.

That made the state, in the journalists’ interpretation, too close to call so they retreated from their declaration and put Florida back in the undecided column. As the night wore on, it became increasingly clear that the entire presidential election was going to come down to who won Florida’s electoral votes.

After 2 a.m. the morning after the election, Fox News made its call: Bush had won Florida and thus would be next president of the United States. ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC quickly followed suit. But the AP did not, believing too many votes remained uncounted in traditionally Democratic areas that could swing the race.

The tension was very real in the AP newsroom that night. Editors from across the country were angrily calling in, noting the network calls and wondering why the AP was holding out. What were they going to put on the front pages of their newspapers?

“It was simply too close for AP to call,” recalled Sandy Johnson, AP’s then-Washington bureau chief, in a 2020 podcast on C-SPAN. “Believe me, we wanted to call it. Nobody wants to be the last calling a presidential race. We were crunching the numbers like mad, trying to figure out what the networks saw that we didn’t. But the lead just kept getting closer.”

In the pre-dawn hours, the networks retracted their Florida calls for the second time that night. It was a major embarrassment. One blown election call could cost a journalist’s job, but calling the same state wrong twice and prematurely declaring the winner for the entire election? Network chiefs were hauled before Congress in the aftermath to explain themselves.

The election remained undecided for three more weeks before a U.S. Supreme Court decision effectively made Bush the winner.

Getting news first — a scoop — is a bragging point for any journalist. A mistake completely undermines that, hence the AP mantra “get it first, but first get it right.” It’s a lesson that is repeated often in a fast-moving world. Just this spring, AP editor Ted Anthony steered the organization away from reports that a gunman at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner had been killed, wanting multiple sources even though other outlets were saying it.

It wasn’t true. Sometimes an outlet’s highest moments are what it doesn’t report.

The AP’s most memorable journalism has often been delivered through a photographer’s lens.

It takes barely a few words to bring some historic AP images instantly to mind: Joe Rosenthal’s picture of U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima in 1945; Eddie Adams’ 1968 photo of a prisoner being executed with a gunshot to the head on a Vietnam street; Evan Vucci’s shot of a bloodied Donald Trump raising a fist in defiance following a 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.

One of AP’s best-known images has arguably been talked about more than seen.

Richard Drew was photographing a fashion show in New York City’s Bryant Park on Sept. 11, 2001, when a message alerted him to a plane flying in to the World Trade Center downtown. He hopped on a subway and when he emerged, began recording the horror before him on his camera.

He fixed upon people who had jumped or were falling from the still intact but burning towers. One image he captured immediately stood out: a man, one leg bent, the other straight, as he fell headfirst to his death. He lined up so perfectly against the metallic lines of the tower behind him that the picture almost seemed choreographed.

Drew’s picture was carried in a handful of newspapers the next day but not many, for the same reason that television networks did not show video of people falling. It was deemed too disturbing.

But it so moved Esquire magazine’s Tom Junod that he wrote an entire cover story about it. “In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow,” Junod wrote. “Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in the last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying.”

Singer Elton John bought a copy of “Falling Man,” calling it “probably one of the most perfect photographs ever taken.” Drew, still working for AP at age 79, attended an exhibition in Paris this spring where the photo was on display.

It wasn’t the only journalism to come from the AP that day that echoed long afterward. Jerry Schwartz, who wrote the story of the day’s disaster, was the first to coin the phrase “ground zero” to refer to the World Trade Center site.

But “Falling Man” has lingered. Drew believes it will be seen more in years to come as the event recedes into history. He doesn’t find the photo macabre. “I made a photographic record of someone living the last moments of his life,” he wrote five years ago. “And every time I look at it, I see him alive.”

Junod and others have investigated to try and identify the man, believed to be a worker at the restaurant Windows on the World. But it’s still not clear who he was, and may never be. Drew likens “Falling Man” to the remains buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington.

“He’s going to remain unknown and that’s OK,” Drew said in a recent interview. “He’s a symbol for all of the people who died that day.”

David Bauder covered media for The Associated Press for more than a decade. He retired in May.