I just got off the phone with Rachel La Corte, the AP reporter who wrote the story in which Rev. Ken Hutcherson promised he would be leading a “national boycott” of companies supporting Washington’s gay civil rights bill — a boycott that, on closer examination, seems not to exist.

Rev. Hutcherson told the AP on Monday that he would be announcing the boycott on Thursday on James Dobson’s national radio program, Focus on the Family, and the AP quickly pushed that news out over its wires. When the Thursday announcement never came, Rev. Hutcherson told me that the AP had its facts wrong.

Did the AP get its facts wrong?

“I stand by the reporting in my story,” La Corte told me.

She’s since talked to Rev. Hutcherson about all this and says: “He insists that I misunderstood him. I don’t feel that I misunderstood him.”

La Corte told me that before she spoke to Hutcherson on Monday, “He’d been trying to get ahold of me all weekend to let me know something he was going to do.” When they finally connected, he told her that he was going to be leading a national boycott of every single company (Microsoft, Boeing, Hewlett-Packard, Nike, Corbis, Vulcan, and RealNetworks) that signed a letter recently supporting Washington’s gay civil rights bill. She asked when he was going to make this announcement, and she says he replied:

“I’m going to be on the Focus on the Family show on Thursday.”

As it turned out, Rev. Hutcherson was not on the Focus on the Family show on Thursday. He was on a “drop-in” segment aired with the show on a few local stations in Washington — not a great way to start a national boycott — and didn’t even mention the boycott on the “drop-in.” Could Rev. Hutch’s vague language to the AP reporter have been a deliberate attempt to mislead her into giving him some national press?

“I’m not going to go into what his motives were, and what his intentions were,” La Corte told me. “I’m just standing by this story.”

Which raises an interesting question: When does a “national boycott” begin to exist? When Rev. Hutch promises the AP one is coming? When the AP reports that one’s coming?

“We find the show secondary to his announcement on Monday,” La Corte says. “Hundreds of millions of AP readers read that story across the country, so in essence, it was announced at that time.”

Here’s something else that was announced at that time via the AP story, and now sounds a little fishy:

Hutcherson said he has the support of several national organizations, including the Family Research Council, Southern Baptist Convention and Focus on the Family. Several of those organizations’ offices could not be reached after hours Monday.

Has La Corte heard back from the FRC or the Southern Baptists about whether they are, in fact, supporting this “national boycott”? She told me she hasn’t yet.

Will the AP be taking another look at this boycott to see if it actually exists, now that it’s been announced to “hundreds of millions” of readers? While she wouldn’t give an absolute yes or no, she did tell me:

“That’s something that we may end up doing a story on — talking to all of these groups again to see where they stand.”