A popular item of "birther" chatter in October 2009 concerned the discovery of an archived copy of a 27 June 2004 article from the web version of the Kenyan-based Sunday Standard newspaper. The article was a reproduction of an Associated Press (AP) wire story which dealt with the withdrawal of Republican candidate Jack Ryan from the race for a seat representing Illinois in the U.S. Senate, paving the way for the Democratic contender, Barack Obama, to win the election. Why this article was of particular interest to birthers was its lead-in sentence, which referred to Barack Obama as "Kenyan-born." Surely, claimed birthers, such an august news agency as the Associated Press would not have identified Barack Obama as "Kenyan-born" if they did not have ample evidence to support its use of that term.
However, the Associated Press made no such reference; the identification of Barack Obama as "Kenyan-born" was added to the Sunday Standard's version of the AP story by someone else (who misspelled the politician's given name as "Barrack" in the process) and is apparently unique to that publication. The full text of the "Jack Ryan Abandons Senate Bid" article as originally issued by the Associated Press is retrievable from the LexisNexis archive of global news sources, and it contains no reference (in the lead-in or elsewhere) to Barack Obama's being "Kenyan-born"