PRESSWATCH: Unaccountably Biased
Taranto, James
PRESSWATCH Unaccountably Biased by James Taranto T HE ASSOCIATED PRESS is not only the world’s biggest wire service but one of the great institutions of American journalism. It was the...
...What did Fournier add to the story by imposing his interpretation on it...
...It was the brainchild of Moses Yale Beach, the second publisher of the New York Sun, as a January 2006 AP report describes: In May 1846, Beach offered to share news from the U.S...
...Weather experts warned of a killer storm...
...I had always known that The Associated Press played a role in holding public officials accountable, but it took a killer hurricane and an incompetent, arrogant government response to make me realize this is no mere role...
...Real gross domestic product grew 3.3 percent in 2005, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis...
...Although again adopting his trademark pox-on-bothhouses pose—“if recent history is a guide, both [parties’ presidential] fields will be bereft of authentic authenticity”—he seemed sympathetic to one candidate in particular: It will be interesting to see what this skeptical electorate thinks of former Sen...
...But there is reason to doubt the AP’s faithfulness to this tradition...
...AP’s imprint of accuracy and fairness is as vital in the murky world of online fact or fiction as it was long ago, when rival press lords bent the truth...
...We can be provocative without being partisan,” he writes...
...Mike Brown [then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency] barked orders...
...Still a newspaper-owned co54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMER 2007 JAMES TARANTO show the kind of journalism he wants his colleagues to produce...
...Fournier offers several examples of his own work to Mears, a Pulitzer Prize-winning four-decade AP veteran, writes in an essay for the new book Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else (Chronicle Books): No twenty-first century technology or marketplace revolution can alter one basic AP tradition: its devotion to accurate, objective news coverage...
...So when he declares himself “a believer,” it ought to raise eyebrows...
...JamesTaranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com, the website of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page...
...Couldn’t Edwards’s “mea culpa” be phony, an effort to pander to his party’s far-left base...
...A CCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM” seems to be catching on in the AP’s campaign coverage...
...But there is a great deal to be said for the discipline of straight news reporting—of sticking to the facts and leaving it to readers to form their own opinions...
...He expresses strong opinions on all of them, though he evades responsibility for those opinions by attributing them to “the public’s view of reality”—as if everyone in “the public” were in agreement...
...Barack Obama of Illinois who opposed the war from the start...
...Edwards is breaking an unwritten rule in Washington to never to [sic] acknowledge misjudgment, one that Sen...
...But the AP didn’t give the benefit of the doubt to Republican Fred Thompson...
...And I was wrong...
...He reports, you decide...
...Here, Fournier rehearses a list of anti-Bush complaints—Iraq, the economy, the Valerie Plame kerfuffle—before even getting to the day’s news...
...It’s an obligation, a liberating one at that...
...Fournier was reporting real news, but why not let the facts speak for themselves...
...PRESSWATCH Unaccountably Biased by James Taranto T HE ASSOCIATED PRESS is not only the world’s biggest wire service but one of the great institutions of American journalism...
...And on at least one of them, the White House’s “view of reality” was demonstrably correct: The economy was booming...
...I N FAIRNESS TO FOURNIER, what he proclaims himself a believer in is ostensibly just a style of journalism, not a political cause...
...The June 1, 2007 edition of the wire service’s internal newsletter carried an article, reprinted on the journalism website Poynter.org, that declared in an introduction: “It’s AP’s goal this year (and henceforth) to make… accountability journalism a consistent theme in our coverage of public affairs, politics and government...
...Those agreements evolved into the AP that today has 4,000 employees and delivers news around the clock to more than 130 countries and 1 billion readers, listeners and viewers...
...SEPTEMBER 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 55...
...It’s a huge opportunity that neither party seems poised to exploit...
...it is entirely opinion and speculation...
...He was right,” Edwards said Sunday night, pointing to Sen...
...This is from September 2, 2005: WASHINGTON (AP)—The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes...
...Anybody who leaks a CIA agent’s identity will be fired...
...In a June 4, 2007 “analysis,” Fournier took on the question of “authenticity” in politics...
...He hopes to make her pay for refusing to apologize for her vote on Iraq...
...Created to take advantage of the newly invented telegraph, AP has confronted all succeeding revolutions in news technology and the expectations born of them, including the rise of online, ondemand information...
...America’s class and racial divides” loom much larger in the liberal imagination than in the minds of those who lean toward the center or the right...
...Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn’t match the public’s view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast...
...John Edwards, a Democrat who has apologized for his 2002 vote to authorize the war in Iraq—and now wears his mea culpa as a badge of honor...
...war with Mexico with rival newspapers...
...The behind-the-scenes drama, captured on videotape as Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, confirmed Americans’ suspicions of government leaders: They can run a good meeting, but little else...
...We can be truth-tellers without being editorial writers...
...Online political editor Ron Fournier wrote the main article, which began: Katrina made a believer out of me...
...The resulting agreement formed the basis for cooperative news gathering by telegraph just as Samuel F. B. Morse’s revolutionary invention be gan a swift expansion throughout the country, linking New York to points north, west, and south...
...The introduction defined “accountability journalism” as reporting on “whether government officials are doing the job for which they were elected and keeping the promises they make...
...The possibility doesn’t seem to have occurred to Fournier, who presents it instead as evidence of Edwards’s honesty...
...The AP is justly proud of its history, as Walter operative, still dedicated to communicating facts, AP has become an international news network for the new age...
...The factual content of this paragraph is zero...
...If the AP abandons this tradition, it will be a tremendous loss to American journalism...
...The economy is booming...
...No doubt some Americans suspected that Bush administration officials “can run a good meeting, but little else,” and had their suspicions confirmed by the video...
...And despite the nod toward nonpartisanship—“that neither party seems poised to exploit”—the ideological bias is clear...
...And this is from March 2, 2006: WASHINGTON (AP)—President Bush vowed, “We are fully prepared...
...But surely others thought more highly of the administration and were disappointed, or took an altogether more charitable view of the tape...
...Hillary Rodham Clinton treats as gospel...
...This is from a Fournier dispatch of September 12: WASHINGTON (AP)—The fatally slow response to Hurricane Katrina unleashed a wave of anger that could transform people’s expectations of government, the qualities they seek in political leaders and their views of America’s class and racial divides...
...When Liz Sidoti filed a July 5 “analysis” of his nascent presidential campaign, it carried the headline “Thompson Lacking Substance”—a bald statement of opinion...
...A reporter, in the AP tradition, is a detached observer, a gatherer and conveyor of facts...
...Far be it from this columnist to disparage opinion journalism, my own occupation...
...But can they...
Vol. 40 • September 2007 • No. 7
