AP Reporter Claims Oakland Raiders Head Coach Dennis Allen Fired But Later Retracts Claim

The good thing about the World Wide Web and things like Twitter is that information can be disseminated all around the world quickly. The bad thing is that is that information can be disseminated around the world quickly.

So when an AP reporter tweeted his sources had told him Oakland Raiders head coach Dennis Allen had been fired he got to experience the thrill of breaking a story and the embarrassment of having to retract it.

@CSNAuthentic

Terry Collins has deleted the tweet claiming Allen had been fired, but nothing is ever truly gone once it makes it online:

via Twitter

If you are going to break a story there is one thing you better do—get it right. As it turns out Collins wasn't and had been referring to rumors:

Please disregard my recent tweet about the Raiders. These rumors haven't been confirmed by the AP. I'm sorry.
— Terry Collins (@APtcollins) September 29, 2014

Had he stopped there he would be just fine. He'd probably get his behind chewed out by his boss, but he retracted it and apologized. Yeah, people tend to trust the AP to be right more often than not when it reports on something, but even AP reporters make mistakes.

Where he screwed up was when he tried to claim he had nothing to do with the story:

I have no information about the status about the Raiders coach. I was never covering the story.
— Terry Collins (@APtcollins) September 29, 2014

Then why did you refer in your original tweet to 'my sources' Collins? Why were you tweeting the information in the first place than? Were you stealing someone else's story and trying to pass it off as your own?

Whatever you did it was just a mistake so own it. Excuses only make you look stupid.

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