This supposed Associated Press headline that misspells Mississippi is not real

The Associated Press didn’t make an embarrassing spelling error in an education story headline, despite a decade old social media claim that it did.

“Missippi’s literacy program shows improvement,” read what appeared to be an AP headline captured in a Nov. 18 photo shared on Threads.

Screenshot from Threads

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But the headline was not written by The AP, a not-for-profit news cooperative.

We searched the Nexis news database for text from the article that was included in the image and found a matching story that was published by the AP on multiple dates with different headlines: on June 10, 2005, with the headline, “Mogul’s literacy investment shows results in poverty-stricken Mississippi;” on June 13, 2005, with the headline “Mogul’s literacy investment paying off in poverty-stricken Mississippi schools;” and on June 13, 2005, with the headline, “Mogul’s Literacy Program Pays Off in Miss.” But there is no Nexis record of the AP publishing a headline misspelling Mississippi.

AP spokesperson Patrick Maks told PolitiFact the organization did not publish the misspelled headline.

Using Google News’ archives, we found other publications had shared the AP story with their own headlines, but none of those misspelled Mississippi.

The earliest version of the misspelled headline we found was posted on YouTube on March 5, 2010, five years after the story was published. In 2021, fact-checking website Snopes debunked the claim that the AP wrote the headline.

We rate the claim that the AP misspelled Mississippi in a headline about the state’s literacy program False.

PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.