Given “mainstream” journalism’s political demeanor in modern times, and as a reflection in particular on confidence in the Associated Press (AP), the wisdom of the maxim “don’t believe everything you read in the papers” could not be a more important for the American people to appreciate in the coming months.
OK, BW is not AP, but they are on the same page. Photo courtesy terrellaftermath.com
Approximately 1,700 newspapers and perhaps more than 5,000 television and radio broadcasters are conduits for what the AP says is the news and increasingly its spin on the meaning of it. The so called “independence” of America’s popular press, something that requires healthy skepticism no matter what, as dependent as it is on this one news gathering service, is increasingly untenable.
The story linked below provides an important read on the real and potential contamination and degradation of truth when the spread of information for popular consumption (i.e. the universe of electoral politics) is edited by one ubiquitous source.
From the article, The Administration’s Press. Read the whole story here.
Just four of the many AP outrages against journalism in the past two weeks include the following:
- An AP reporter wrote that supporters of the Keystone pipeline “say it will create over 1,000 jobs.” Well, I guess “over a dozen” would also have been technically true. Supporters’ estimates actually range from 2,500 to 500,000, depending on whether they are referring to direct jobs or are also including gains from spin-off employment.
- When Congress unanimously rejected Obama’s farcical budget proposal, AP waited until the fifth paragraph of its report to tell readers that the vote was 414-0 (specifics almost guaranteed not to get mentioned over the airwaves), and would only describe it as “overwhelmingly rejected” by a “GOP-run Congress” in order “to embarrass Democrats.”
- In the first four days after the New Black Panthers issued a bounty for the capture of George Zimmerman in the tragic death of Trayvon Martin, AP reports cryptically noted the existence of a bounty just once, with no mention of its source.
- A truly bizarre and Orwellian sequence of AP dispatches over the course of one business day on the consumer confidence report from the Conference Board went from “falls” to “dips slightly” to “roughly flat” to (brace yourself) a “rosy outlook.” The index fell from 71.6 in February to 70.2 in March.
Regular Veritaspac.com readers will be aware of a local hook to the story. The Chairperson of the Associated Press Is Mary Junck, who runs Lee Enterprises, headquartered here in Davenport, which owns the Quad-City Times. The Associated Press is a non-profit corporation, which on that score would seem appropriate for Ms Junck to lead, given Lee Enterprises financial track record. DLH
The real war should be against the “The Associated Press.” We have so many fake wars that these people have created it’s almost unbelievable. The war on woman, minorities, skateboarders, hacky sack players, olympic curlers…the list never ends.