Oil Prices & AP Headlines

So, I'm looking at my Google Desktop newsfeed and I see a headline from Forbes: "Oil Inches Up Ahead of U.S. Supply Data." Okay, fine. Oil prices just rose. It says so right there in that article.

But then I do a double take as my Google Desktop newsfeed adds another headline a minute later that says, "Oil Prices Fall Below $74 a Barrel." Okay, now I'm officially confused. Did oil prices go up, or did they go down?

Upon closer inspection of the two articles, I noted the following:

1) Both articles are from the Associated Press. Normally, I would expect that articles coming from the same news agency would agree with each other. Apparently that's a foolish assumption.

2) Both articles are virtually identical. That's right. Aside from the time at which they were released, and the polar opposite events that their headlines seem to report, the articles are pretty much identical.

How is this possible? How can the same article get two wildly different headlines??? Well, I'm still trying to wrap my head around this, but as far as I can tell, the headlines are addressing two different time points within the same trading day. In the first article (the one that was released at 6:49 AM ET), the second paragraph reads:

"Light, sweet crude for August delivery fell 4 cents to $73.98 a barrel in Asian electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, late afternoon in Singapore. The contract ended 13 cents lower at $74.02 a barrel Tuesday." [Emphasis mine]

In the second article (released at 12:41 AM ET), the same paragraph reads:

"Light, sweet crude for August delivery rose 11 cents to $74.13 a barrel in Asian electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, midmorning in Singapore. The contract ended 13 cents lower at $74.02 a barrel Tuesday." [Again, emphasis mine]

You'll notice that both articles report exactly the same closing price!

So, apparently you can say anything you want about price changes in the markets, as long as you're sure to cherry-pick the appropriate slice of time! And, if you're really ballsy, you can even print two different articles on the same trading day reporting two entirely different results for the day.

What did actually happen to the price of oil in Singapore today? Well, it's impossible to tell from these articles alone, since neither one provides the opening price and both of them use the same phrase, "the contract ended 13 cents lower at $74.02 a barrel," without telling us the significance of the price that they are comparing it to. Can we assume it's the opening price that was 13 cents higher than $74.02? I'm not sure. From the structure of the paragraph, the price that was being compared should have been the one quoted in the first sentence (i.e. $73.98 in the first article and $74.13 in the second article). Of course, the ending price of $74.02 is not "13 cents lower" than either of those.

What conclusions can we draw from this little exercise? First, that the Associated Press doesn't proofread. Second, that the Associated Press releases absolute garbage. And third, that organizations like Forbes.com will print anything that the AP releases without checking the accuracy of it.