BROOKE GLADSTONE: And now we turn to our second cautionary tale: a video fraud -- last weekend's execution shown round the world. [CLIP PLAYS] [MAN'S VOICE CHANTING IN ARABIC UNDER]

BENJAMIN VANDERFORD: My name is Benjamin Vanderford. I'm from San Francisco, California, 1510 Eddy Street. I have been offered for exchange for some prisoners here in Iraq.... [CLIP ENDS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Back in May, some San Franciscan pranksters shot grainy footage of what we later learned was the wrong side of a dull vegetable knife sawing against a man's throat. That video languished on some file-sharing websites until last Saturday, when it appeared on an Arabic site that has posted videos of real terrorist beheadings. The Associated Press and some other news outlets picked it up and ran with it, but it came to a screeching halt when the AP woke up 22 year old presumed-victim Benjamin Vanderford to find out if he still had his head. He did, but many wonder if it's screwed on straight, since Ben and his friend sent the video into cyberspace, explicitly to fake out the media. The AP was quickest to run the video and to expose the hoax. For the play by play, we turn to AP Deputy Managing Editor Tom Kent. Welcome to the show.

TOM KENT: Thank you, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, although the video was first posted on the web months ago, it didn't come to the attention of the media until it showed up on an Islamic website known for posting terrorist communiques. How did the AP come to rely on this site for its news leads?

TOM KENT: Well, this is one of the sites that we watch fairly closely. This Islamic Minbar site has had a lot of things in the past, statements by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. It had a video August 2nd of a Turkish hostage being killed. It's had statements by the organization that claimed responsibility for the Madrid attack, so it has been a site that has had a lot of authentic material on it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Would you ever spike footage, even if you knew it was authenticated, because you suspected that you were being used?

TOM KENT: When things get out there of this magnitude, it's hard to ignore them. You get accused of suppressing things -- holding off. The world is so inter-connected these days that it's difficult to try to isolate something. But at the same time, our correspondents in Baghdad, Cairo, throughout the Middle East and indeed all around the world spend as much time throwing things out as we do covering them, and we go out to -- sometimes at some peril to our lives -- to check out these reports.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, for the first 90 minutes, the AP ran the story without the disclaimer that the tape couldn't be verified. Is there a reason why that happened, or was it just a screwup?

TOM KENT: Well, we went for about 30 minutes before we started putting in words like "purportedly" in the story, and that was our mistake. We have to put in those qualifiers until we can be sure of something ourselves.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, the people who conducted this little "media experiment," as they call it, made an explicit effort to dupe news organization, and in all fairness, this isn't the first hoax ever perpetrated on the media. Do you think it's fair to expect news organizations to guard against every such ruse?

TOM KENT: This hoax, above all, has just reminded us of the need to hew to our own policies. We are going to scramble somebody, as we did in this case, scrambled two people at about 4 a.m. in San Francisco -- go out to this guy's house. We managed to get into his apartment building. We banged on the door, and we got him out of bed, and he sat there, bare-chested, shrugging, sipping from a diet soda, and told us about the hoax. So, we didn't just pick this up and let it sit. For what it's worth, we were the organization that did break the fact that it was a hoax.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's true. But I think that, you know, in the current environment, as the public got fed falsehoods on everything from weapons of mass destruction to the rescue of Jessica Lynch, polls say they just trust us less and less, and do you think they're right to?

TOM KENT: There's a greater amount of information floating around the whole world now than there ever was. I suppose that percentage-wise, there's going to be more false information in there. The only thing we can do is try to get to the bottom of it, as we did in this case.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It almost seems like stories like these come out by occult hand to embarrass the media. Just bad luck for the AP?

TOM KENT: Well, you know, every organization faces a hoax now and then. We devote an awful lot of efforts to make sure that we handle it right.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Thanks a lot.

TOM KENT: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tom Kent is deputy managing editor for the Associated Press. [MUSIC]

BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, a jury's life or death deliberation on television, and journalism's equivalent of a secret handshake.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR. [FUNDING CREDITS]