The Associated Press - not particularly Fair or Balanced

It doesn't take a sociologist to see what has been obvious for years:  THE ASSOCIATED PRESS is only as fair and balanced as the owners of the cooperative “news” organization, and for years it has been neither, especially in the political arena.

It's time we start to call them on it, and a headline I read regarding yesterday's Wisconsin Recall Election results against six sitting Republican state senators was the last straw!

Wisconsin GOP's stand could reverberate elsewhere, the headline blared from my list of AP news stories, a list I look through every day.

Before you click on the link, take a moment and think:  what IS the focus of the story?  

If I knew nothing about it and/or didn't really care and only saw the headline, I'd think, hmmm, sounds like the Republicans did well at something in Wisconsin.  But would that really be true?

One study last year reported that 44% of people reading headlines through their Google Newsreader only scan the headlines and don't click through to the underlying news.  

Time’s up.  Here it is again.  Click:   Wisconsin GOP's stand could reverberate elsewhere
(August 14 update:  The headline and body were changed sometime after my original post.  See bottom).

Now, because I knew what the story was about and knew that the headline didn't jibe with what I knew, I went on and read the story.  My blood began to boil.

As a former newspaper editor, I was taught that not only should the lead of the story, usually the first paragraph, be factual, it should also encourage readers to be drawn in and read more.  My anger intensified as I read the lead.

"A stand by Wisconsin Republicans against a massive effort to oust them from power could reverberate across the country as the battle over union rights and the conservative revolution heads toward the 2012 presidential race."

Wow.  Sounds like the Alamo.  Outnumbered and outgunned, the brave members of the GOP faced down those Democratic savages.

But the reality is this:  angry VOTERS, not all Democrats, had had enough of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s anti-union AND anti-democratic behavior.  It wasn’t just the fact that the Republican majority in the statehouse voted to strip bargaining rights for state employee union members but also it was how it was done. 

In action receiving national attention, Wisconsinites not only protested, they made a decision to initiate a number of recall elections against a number of sitting Republican state senators who supported the governor’s agenda.  The just-elected governor had not campaigned on the issue. In retaliation, voters in three other districts fought back and signed on to recall Democratic state senators, ostensibly for leaving the state with the rest of the state’s 14 Democratic senators rather than vote to dismantle union bargaining rights.  One Democrat has already retained his seat and the other two face an election next week.  In all, efforts to collect recall petition signatures succeeded against 6 of 8 Republicans, and against 3 of 8 Democrats.

It is a much longer story and includes Republicans fielding faux-Democratic candidates to run in primary elections to force Democrats to spend money and buy time to delay the actual recall election.  Estimates are that between $30 and $40 million was spent by both sides, thanks to the unlimited spending granted by the US Supreme Court in its Citizens United ruling.  That’s 10 times what was spent in 2010 on the entire slate of Wisconsin state elections and is a precursor to 2012.

And those are just some of the highlights – now back to the Associated Press.

For those of you who aren't aware, the AP is an American news agency.  It is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, such as the Denver Post, and radio and television stations in the United States.  Those businesses contribute to shared content which also supplements those of staff AP "journalists."  The organization claims 3,700 editorial, communications and administrative employees worldwide and says 2/3rds of those are "newsgatherers."

Funny.  When I read the term "newsgatherer" on the AP web site, I had a vision of squirrels darting about, picking up nuts, stashing them, and then telling other squirrels they are farmers and the stash is a grocery store.

The AP goes to considerable length on their web site to explain its' Statement of News Values and Principles.  And it includes in those principles that "we abhor inaccuracies, carelessness, bias or distortions."

Well.  The AP may abhor bias and distortion, but it continues to practice both in very subtle ways - particularly in political news, where the issue is especially true in headline writing.  I do not know the contractual obligation between the AP and its newspaper-members, but given that I usually see the same headline in many newspapers, the papers may be obligated to run the same headline, I don't know.

The Wisconsin election story is just totally lacking in integrity.

“Democrats and union leaders tried to make the best of the historic GOP wins,” the article says, painting the Dems as losers after winning in heavily Republican areas.  The fact is that since 1913, there had been only 13 successful recalls of state level office holders nationwide.  So the Dems lost?  The fact that the GOP members retained their seats isn’t as much the news as the two Dems who moved the 13 to 15 in almost a century and bring the balance of power in the state senate to a single Republican senator margin (18-17).

The AP author pitted “union rights” against the “conservative revolution.”

Really?  There is a conservative revolution?  I don’t think so.  It pitted working people against big money and yes, it’s class warfare.  But correlating this to the “conservative revolution” is seemingly wishful thinking on the part of the author.

“Should two Democrats manage to win their own recall elections next week,” he writes.  Boy, I hope they can hang on, should they manage to.

"Still, it was far less than what Democrats set out to achieve.  And while they still plan to move ahead with recalling Walker, maintaining momentum for that effort, which can't start until November, will be difficult," he writes.

Really?  And who made you a pundit?  It's just bad, subtly biased journalism.

This isn't an indictment of all reporters, just a small set of examples from a single news story that is part of an AP pattern I observed starting years ago.  I have college friends that today are reporters, quality reporters, who have integrity and display quality writing.  But they are the exception these days, not the rule.  And none work for the AP.

When reflecting, consider this question:  "Who owns the media?"  Then ask yourself:  "Who benefits from the exponential political expenditures thanks to the Citizens United ruling?"  You might just decide they're one in the same.

***August 14 -- I notice that the headline was changed sometime after my original post, to a less GOP-centric one, but the lead and other portions of the story were worse, the new lead starting, "Wisconsin Democrats brushed aside their failure to seize control of the state Senate through recall elections...."   Any way it's sliced or re-sliced, it's still baloney.