AP article debunking JD Vance couch story didn’t go through 'standard editing process': report

25 July 2024

In the span of roughly a week, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) went from being anointed as former President Donald Trump's 2024 running mate to having to fend off accusations about a sex act with a couch. Now, questions are surrounding an Associated Press (AP) fact-check about the couch myth that was retracted after publication.

After Vance received the Republican Party's vice presidential nomination, a rumor circulated that on pages 179 through 181 of Vance's memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, he allegedly wrote about having sex with a latex glove wedged between two couch cushions. This rumor resulted in a flurry of couch-related memes mocking the Ohio senator to proliferate on social media. The AP proceeded to publish an article entitled, "No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch" debunking the story.

On Thursday, Semafor media editor Max Tani reported that the AP's fact-check, which went viral before being retracted and then republished with a new headline, was apparently published in haste.

"A spokesperson for the AP tells me this story didn’t go through the wire service’s standard editing process, and the AP is looking into how it was published," Tani tweeted. "The spokesperson also emphasizes that the piece did not go out on the wire to AP customers."

The AP's fact-check noted that the rumor has been baked into voters' minds despite not being true, and cited one post on X (formerly Twitter) in which the user wrote that Vance "wrote about humping a couch" that received more than 36,000 likes and over 15,000 retweets. Mediaite cited the AP's review of a PDF of Hillbilly Elegy and wrote that while the AP's search "produced 10 references of 'couch' or 'couches' ... in none of them did Vance take liberties."

"'Sofa' and 'glove' did not appear anywhere in the memoir," the AP added in its fact-check.

On the social media platform Bluesky, disinformation expert Brooke Binkowski — a former managing editor of fact-checking website Snopes — referred to the AP's bungling of the couch rumor fact-check as an "unintentionally hilarious s—show."

Vance isn't the only member of the 2024 Republican ticket to be caught up in an internet rumor gone awry. In 2018, when journalist Michael Wolff's tell-all book Fire and Fury came out, a rumor quickly spread about then-President Trump's obsession with something called "the gorilla channel."

Politico reported that the rumor — which came from Twitter user @PixelatedBoat — was presented as a passage from Wolff's book in which Trump complained that "the gorilla channel" wasn't available on the White House TV, prompting aides to hastily cobble together nature documentary footage of gorillas from a tower on the White House's South lawn. @PixelatedBoat's fake passage then described Trump supposedly lamenting that it was "boring" because the gorillas weren't "fighting," which sent White House aides scrambling to edit out all footage that wasn't gorilla-on-gorilla combat. The "gorilla channel" rumor became a trending topic on Twitter and ended up fooling numerous media figures, including Fox Business contributor Charles Gasparino.

The AP has not yet elaborated on how the initial fact-check was published without going through the standard review process. However, the ongoing drama surrounding the couch myth and the fallout from AP's botched fact-check may have created a headache for the Trump campaign that's more commonly referred to as the "Streisand Effect" in internet culture. That term originates from actress Barbara Streisand's publicist attempting to remove an image of her Malibu home from an article that only ended up increasing interest in the photo itself, prompting it to spread to an even wider audience.

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