Associated Press Reporter Tom Hays Wins Duranty-Blair Award for “Boosgate” Hoax

By Nicholas Stix

AP reporter Tom Hays has won the Duranty-Blair Award for Journalistic Infamy, for his 2004 “Boosgate” hoax. Hays is the fifth Duranty-Blair laureate. The previous four were CBS News producer Mary Mapes in 2004; seven reporters and editors at the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2006; ABC News reporter Brian Ross in 2012; and Peter Berger, of The American Interest, in 2013.

On September 3, 2004, during the presidential campaign pitting Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry (MA) against incumbent Republican President George W. Bush, Bush gave a speech in Madison, Wisconsin. During the speech, President Bush announced that Democratic President Bill Clinton was suffering chest pains, and might need coronary bypass surgery, and led the Christian crowd in prayer. Tom Hays fabricated an incident, in which the crowd of thousands booed President Clinton, so as to make Republicans sound as heartless and sadistic as Hays and his Marxist comrades.

Hays’ bosses at AP supported him, and did not punish him in any way, much less fire him, presumably because they were as rabidly Democrat as he was.

Audience boos as Bush offers best wishes for Clinton's recovery
By Associated Press, 9/3/2004 13:57

WEST ALLIS, Wis. (AP) President Bush (news - web sites) on Friday wished Bill Clinton (news - web sites) "best wishes for a swift and speedy recovery."

"He's is in our thoughts and prayers," Bush said at a campaign rally.

Bush's audience of thousands in West Allis, Wisconsin, booed. Bush did nothing to stop them….

As I wrote at the time,

In fact, however, the crowd had responded with respectful applause.

The false story was immediately caught and reported to conservative talk radio shows and blogs. Less than one hour after the story first went out on the wire, under the byline of AP reporter Tom Hays, it was retracted, corrected, and the original link killed. The new title was "Bush offers best wishes for Clinton's recovery." There was no mention of the changes; however, the later version without the "boos" run by the New York Times-owned Boston Globe still carried the title "audience boos as bush offers best wishes for clintons recovery" in its URL….
At press time, AP corporate communications had not responded to telephone and e-mail requests for comment from this reporter on Sunday night, reporter Tom Hays had not responded to a Sunday night e-mail seeking comment, and no message was posted regarding the false story at the AP Web site.

Knight-Ridder’s Web site also did not refer to the story.
Tom Curley is AP’s president and CEO. (AP Corporate Communications: E-mail: info@ap.org ; tel.: 212-621-6060.)

I wrote two reports on Hays’ hoax:
“AP Reporter Invents Anti-Clinton ‘Boos’ at Wisconsin Bush Rally”; and

“‘Boos’ Scandal Widens: AP Stonewalls; Knight-Ridder Also Distributed Hoax,”

both of which I reprinted together in 2012 as “Associated Press Reporter Tom Hays’ Classic ‘Boosgate’ Hoax.”

The Boosgate Hoax was one of a string of dirty tricks pulled by Democratic operatives passing themselves off as journalists, and trying to steal the presidential election for Marxist John Kerry. Two other episodes that I covered were CBS News producer Mary Mapes’ Memogate Hoax, in which tried to cost President Bush the election by using fraudulent documents claiming he had been AWOL while a member of the Texas Air National Guard, and the media/DNC plan to steal the election on election night, in a repeat of 2000. (For 2000, see here, here, here,here, here, here and here). John Kerry himself put a stop to that criminal conspiracy. (So, the old communist ain’t all bad.) The day after the election, Katie Couric and some of her comrades sought to cause another constitutional crisis, by asserting that because the election was so close, President Bush didn’t have a “mandate.” Of course, they never would have made such a ridiculous and seditious claim, had Kerry won such a close election.

During the 2000 post-election siege of the White House, Democrats had made it clear to the nation that for them, “It ain’t over, til the Democrat wins.”

The Duranty-Blair Award recognizes those journalists whose work embodies the spirit of Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair, two of the most notorious journalists in the history of the Fourth Estate. It is no accident that both men worked for the New York Times.

Walter Duranty wrote a series of early 1930s dispatches from the Soviet Union, where he was Times Moscow bureau chief, in which he lied about the Ukrainian Holocaust, in which Stalin deliberately starved millions of Kulaks (peasants) to death, through a man-made famine. Instead of reporting the truth, Duranty reported that the peasants were happy and well-fed, and was rewarded for his lies with a Pulitzer Prize.

Jayson Blair (here, here, and here) was an early 2000s black affirmative action hire who alternately plagiarized reporters at other newspapers, and fabricated articles out of whole cloth, all for stories set hundreds and even thousands of miles away, while he sat in New York City cafés.

Previous Duranty-Blair winners have been producer Mary “Memogate,” aka Rathergate Mapes of CBS News; New Orleans Times-Picayune reporters Brian Thevenot, Gordon Russell, Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa; managing editors, news, Peter Kovacs and Dan Shea; and editor Jim Amoss, for their September 26, 2005 attempt to “untell” the story of the savage black violence that befell New Orleans just before and after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29 of that year (1,900-word version; two-part, 3,900-word version (here and here; and 9,900-word version); “ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent” Brian Ross, who in 2002 had sought, on behalf of the Justice Department/FBI, to railroad innocent weapons scientist Dr. Steven J. Hatfill for the fall, 2002 anthrax murders, and who in 2012 falsely asserted that Aurora, CO movie theater mass murderer, James Holmes, was a member of the TEA Party; and Peter Berger, of The American Interest, in 2013 for his support of, and cover-up of the ongoing genocide against South African whites.