AP Reporter Blasts NYT 'Scoop'

Fearing his work covering the Deepwater Horizon disaster early this year will be forgotten, Associated Press reporter Harry Weber lashed out at The New York Times, which ran a sprawling reconstruction of the doomed well's final hours on Sunday. Weber accuses the Times of lying about the exclusivity of its scoop and fishing for a Pulitzer. "Their key assertions that the destruction of the Horizon 'has escaped intense scrutiny' and that the final hours are only now possible to piece together are patently false," Weber wrote in a memo obtained by the journalism blog Romenesko. "A dozen different AP staffers as early as May have done numerous spot, enterprise and investigative reconstruct pieces on every element in the Times story, plus many they didn’t focus on." Weber goes on to rebut the Times' claims that it based its story on exclusive documents and images, and says only readers with amnesia will believe them. "The Times doesn't own the history books," Weber wrote.