Sunday, December 3, 2006
Jules Crittenden takes out the sledge-hammer on the Associated Press: Say no to AP’s shoddy work
That’s when the customers, en masse, need to raise a stink. That’s when someone else with the resources needs to seriously consider whether the time is ripe to compete.
The Associated Press is embroiled in a scandal. Conservative bloggers, the new media watchdogs, lifted a rock at the AP...
...It has to do with the AP’s Iraqi stringers and an oft-quoted Iraqi police captain named Jamil Hussein. Problem is, the Iraqi police say Capt. Hussein does not exist. The Iraqi police and U.S. military say an incident described in an AP report - Iraqi soldiers standing by as people were burned alive in a mosque - didn’t happen. Another AP-reported incident, U.S. soldiers shooting 11 civilians, also never happened, the military says.
When the AP was forced to acknowledge this situation, it did so in a story about a new Interior Ministry policy regarding false reports. The AP buried the fact that its own false report prompted this new policy.
The AP stands by its reporting.. The AP has cast “Capt. Jamil Hussein†simply as someone not authorized to speak, and AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll has sniffed morally: “Good reporting relies on more than government-approved sources.â€
The AP has another Iraqi stringer problem. Photographer Bilal Hussein is in U.S. custody, and the AP has been clamoring indignantly for his release. AP reports have buried the U.S. explanation that Hussein is being held without charge because - quite aside from producing photos that showed him to be overly intimate with terrorists in Fallujah - he was in an al-Qaeda bomb factory, with an al-Qaeda bombmaker, with traces of explosives on his person when he was arrested.
The AP, of course, has been delivering unbalanced reports about U.S. national politics for some time, as when President Bush, whom AP reporters despise, is barely allowed to state his case on an issue before his critics are given twice as much space to pummel him. The AP, once a just-the-facts news delivery service, has lost its rudder. It has become a partisan, anti-American news agency that seeks to undercut a wartime president and American soldiers in the field. It is providing fraudulent, shoddy goods. It doesn’t even recognize it has a problem...
Update: Don Surber says Crittenden "spoke for many of us today," here.
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Some of the AP's problem- probably a lot- stems from reporters motivated by ideology rather a devotion to truth.
But some of it stems from the ever shrinking budgets of news organizations. And what budgets there are tend to be devoted to chasing ratings/readership more than to seeking the truth. We wind up with unknowledgable reporters at foreign desks and unknowledgable editors back home, so that modern day Goebels don't have to try very hard to spread big lies. Only volunteer bloggers have the time to ferret out the truth. Eventually, I think the image of news organizations will catch up with the truth, and the news consuming public will stop giving undeserved trust to AP et al.
UPI used to compete actively with AP, but it hasn't been much of a credible news source since the Moonies bought it.
Reporting ain't what it used to be -- if it ever was. There's always been manipulation -- freedom of the press tends to belong to them who owns one. So, the AP and other "trusted sources" are proving to be less than reliable.
Recently, an assistant professor of communications, did a study of the coverage of the Bush Presidency. I can't remember where I came across the following, but I wonder if this decade will go down in history as an example of just how badly the truth has been distorted in an age when "news" can be disseminated as quickly and broadly as it can:
BLACKSBURG, VA., November 30, 2006 - Jim A. Kuypers, assistant professor of communication in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech, reveals a disturbing world of media bias in his new book Bush’s War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2006).
Convincingly and without resorting to partisan politics, Kuypers strongly illustrates in eight chapters “how the press failed America in its coverage on the War on Terror.†In each comparison, Kuypers “detected massive bias on the part of the press.†In fact, Kuypers calls the mainstream news media an “anti-democratic institution†in the conclusion.
“What has essentially happened since 9/11 has been that Bush has repeated the same themes, and framed those themes the same whenever discussing the War on Terror,†said Kuypers, who specializes in political communication and rhetoric. “Immediately following 9/11, the mainstream news media (represented by CBS, ABC, NBC, USA Today, New York Times, and Washington Post) did echo Bush, but within eight weeks it began to intentionally ignore certain information the president was sharing, and instead reframed the president’s themes or intentionally introduced new material to shift the focus.â€
This goes beyond reporting alternate points of view. “In short,†Kupyers explained, “if someone were relying only on the mainstream media for information, they would have no idea what the president actually said. It was as if the press were reporting on a different speech.â€