The Associated Press misspelled Mississippi in a headline about the state’s literacy program.
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This supposed Associated Press headline that misspells Mississippi is not real
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Records from the Nexis news database show that The Associated Press never published the headline. The news organization posted a related story in 2005 with a different headline that had no spelling errors.
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An AP spokesperson confirmed the news organization never published the misspelled headline.
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The earliest version of the misspelled headline we could find appeared on YouTube in 2010, five years after the story was published.
The Associated Press didn’t make an embarrassing spelling error in an education story headline, despite a decade old social media claim that it did.
"Missippi’s literacy program shows improvement," read what appeared to be an AP headline captured in a Nov. 18 photo shared on Threads.
Screenshot from Threads
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)
But the headline was not written by The AP, a not-for-profit news cooperative.
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We searched the Nexis news database for text from the article that was included in the image and found a matching story that was published by the AP on multiple dates with different headlines: on June 10, 2005, with the headline, "Mogul’s literacy investment shows results in poverty-stricken Mississippi;" on June 13, 2005, with the headline "Mogul’s literacy investment paying off in poverty-stricken Mississippi schools;" and on June 13, 2005, with the headline, "Mogul’s Literacy Program Pays Off in Miss." But there is no Nexis record of the AP publishing a headline misspelling Mississippi.
AP spokesperson Patrick Maks told PolitiFact the organization did not publish the misspelled headline.
Using Google News’ archives, we found other publications had shared the AP story with their own headlines, but none of those misspelled Mississippi.
The earliest version of the misspelled headline we found was posted on YouTube on March 5, 2010, five years after the story was published. In 2021, fact-checking website Snopes debunked the claim that the AP wrote the headline.
We rate the claim that the AP misspelled Mississippi in a headline about the state’s literacy program False.
PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
Our Sources
Threads post (archived), Nov. 18, 2024
Email interview, Patrick Maks, spokesperson, The Associated Press, Nov. 20, 2024
The Wenatchee World, Investment in literacy program pays dividends: Mississippi schoolchildren show ‘statistically significant’ improvement, June 13, 2005
Google Books, The Union Democrat, June 14, 2005
YouTube, Spelling Fail, March 5, 2010
Snopes, Did AP Use the Spelling ‘Missippi’ in a Headline About Literacy?, Oct. 25, 2021
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This supposed Associated Press headline that misspells Mississippi is not real
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