More than three months after being challenged, the Associated Press (AP) responded to the documentary The Stringer. The film, directed by Bao Nguyen and screened at the Sundance Festival in late January, stirred the photojournalism world by contesting the authorship of one of the world's most famous photos, the Napalm Girl (1972). The documentary claimed that this image, symbolizing the suffering of the Vietnam War, was not taken by the Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut of AP, a Pulitzer Prize winner, but by another unknown independent Vietnamese photographer, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, who has since settled in the United States.

On Tuesday, May 6, the American agency released a thorough investigation published in a nearly 96-page document. It concluded that although the film raises disturbing questions, there is not enough evidence, in their view, to assert that Ut is not the photo's author. Therefore, they will continue to credit the image to him.

In response to the film's arguments, the AP team scrutinized previously unseen documents: all the images taken at the site − in Trang Bang, Vietnam, on June 8, 1972 − in AP's archives (84 negatives), as well as unpublished photographs by American journalist David Burnett, who worked for the New York Times at the time. However, it was particularly by studying Ut's cameras, including the Leica supposedly used for the famous photo, that the agency reached a surprising conclusion that supports the film's claims.

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