20 November 2009 @ 9:16AM >> Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto noticed something interesting about the priorities of the Associated Press:

An Associated Press dispatch, written by Erica Werner and Richard Alonso-Zaldivar, compares the House and Senate ObamaCare bills. We’d like to compare this dispatch to the AP’s dispatch earlier this week “fact checking” Sarah Palin’s new book. Here goes:

Number of AP reporters assigned to story:

• ObamaCare bills: 2
• Palin book: 11

Number of pages in document being covered:

• ObamaCare bills: 4,064
• Palin book: 432

Number of pages per AP reporter:

• ObamaCare bill: 2,032
• Palin book: 39.3

On a per-page basis, that is, the AP devoted 52 times as much manpower to the memoir of a former Republican officeholder as to a piece of legislation that will cost trillions of dollars and an untold number of lives. That’s what they call accountability journalism.

6 October 2008 @ 9:31AM >> In a report that isn’t labeled an editorial, the Associated Press contends that criticizing Senator Barack Obama for his connections to unapologetic domestic terrorist Bill Ayers amounts to racism. (Or, in the exact words of AP, pointing out the ties between Obama and Ayers “carrie[s] a racially tinged subtext.”)

The article objects to the following statement from Alaska Governor Sarah Palin:

“Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country. This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America.”

The very first fundraiser of Barack Obama’s political career was held at the house of Ayers and his co-conspirator wife Bernardine Dorhn, two of the leaders of the Weather Underground. For years, the Weathermen terrorized Americans by bombing the U.S. Capital, the Pentagon, military recruiting stations and dozens of other locations, leading to several deaths. The Weathermen also killed a guard during an attempt to rob an armored car.

In addition to kicking off his political career at Ayers’s house, Obama was also tapped to lead an organization set up by Ayers to bring his goals for radicalizing education to Chicago public schools. Ayers, you see, is one of those folks who believes that, in order to be effective, indoctrination must start a lot sooner than college. And Obama worked to further the Ayers agenda for years.

But in the eyes of the establishment media, which has taken great pains to ignore the ties between Obama and Ayers, these years-long connections amount to nothing worth exploring. If one were to judge by the volume of coverage, Sarah Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy is much more relevant to the presidential election, it seems.

As for the argument that discussing Ayers and Obama’s work for his organization is somehow “racist,” well, the AP’s logic isn’t quite clear:

Palin’s words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee “palling around” with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn’t see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers’ day 40 years ago.

Huh? So pointing out Obama’s ties to a white terrorist is somehow racist because we’re supposed to assume that all terrorists are “dark-skinned radical Muslims”? I thought it wasn’t politically correct to assume that. If anything, the AP should be congratulating Palin for pointing out that not all nutjobs who adhere to a murderous ideology are Muslim.

It doesn’t matter, though. Apparently, any criticism of Obama is inherently racist. We’re all just supposed to shut up and get out of the way so the media’s candidate can win the election and rule without opposition.

29 July 2008 @ 8:10AM >> Another unbiased, impartial report from the good folks at the Associated Press:

Republicans on Saturday blocked the Senate from considering a bill next week that would nearly double federal aid to help the poor pay heating and air-conditioning bills.

Although a dozen Senate Republicans support the measure, most voted with GOP leaders who would rather spend the time trumpeting their call to expand offshore oil drilling before Congress takes six weeks off for vacation and the presidential nominating conventions.

It doesn’t get much more blatant than that.

Kudos to AP for doing its part to drive the media’s credibility into the ground.

(Hat tip: Kevin D. Williamson)

17 June 2008 >> The Associated Press, which is currently threatening legal action against bloggers who quote excerpts of AP stories, has been caught extensively quoting from a blog without permission.

The copyright doctrine of fair use is generally lenient in allowing works to be quoted or reproduced for news and commentary purposes. Yet earlier this year, the Associated Press forced the website SnappedShot to take down various AP photos which had been posted for the purpose of criticism. Brian C. Ledbetter, who runs SnappedShot, believed he was well within his fair use rights, but he lacked the resources to fight the media powerhouse.

And within the last week, it came to light that AP lawyers threatened the proprietor of another blog for posting excerpts of AP articles. Considering that none of the excerpts posted were longer than 79 words, the AP’s stance seemed extreme to many, and the incident led to a lot of outrage online.

So it is odd timing, then, that just yesterday the Associated Press published a story lifting content from a blog without permission:

In a news item about the e-mail from Judge Kozinski’s wife that I posted on this site, an AP article lifted numerous passages.

I counted 154 words quoted from my post. That’s almost twice the number of words contained in the most extensive quotation in the Drudge Retort.

So am I going to be an ass and threaten to charge them, or sue them, or demand that they remove the quotes? Of course not. They benefited from my content and I benefited from their link.

Just like when the Drudge Retort quoted them.

And I’m going to go on quoting AP stories, within fair use guidelines.

And if they start threatening me, I’ll have to remind them that they did the same to me.

This isn’t the first time the Associated Press has been busted for taking content without permission from online sources.

It seems that fair use rights are only afforded to those with enough resources to defend those rights in court.

11 December 2007 @ 6:56PM >> The headline above can be parsed in two different ways. A court in Iraq will soon try to determine which is more accurate.

Jim Hanson of Pajamas Media reports:

AP photographer Bilal Hussein was on the radar screen of US forces prior to his being detained in a chance encounter April 12, 2006. He was a stringer working in Fallujah who filed numerous reports and photos that seemed to need a high degree of cooperation from the terrorists. He has been in custody for 19 months and will soon face trial by the Iraqi government on charges related to his activities with Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and Ramadi. Evidence against him is expected to be given to the Iraqi government this week.

Hussein was in his house with Hamid Hamad Motib, a known al-Qaeda leader, last year when Marines wanted to use the house as an observation point. They determined Motib’s identity and status as a wanted terrorist and took both him and Hussein into custody. They also recovered a number of items that led them to believe that Hussein was involved in insurgent activities. The US will now provide the evidence it has to the Iraqi government.

[...]

Bilal Hussein had free reign [sic] to be anywhere and was often taking pictures in the company of insurgents and terrorists. He and the other stringers who made up AP’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo team managed to capture assassinations as they happened. They were on site at bombings within seconds to capture the carnage almost as it happened.

This access and the number of false reports of civilian deaths led the information operations staff to take note. They began monitoring Hussein more closely for two reasons: one they were tasked with countering or debunking false claims of civilian casualties and atrocities, second because Hussein’s very tight relations with the insurgents could be used against the Marines themselves.

The photo to the right was taken by Balil Hussein. It appears to show Italian hostage Salvatore Santoro shortly before he was executed. The Associated Press tries to defend Hussein by copping to a different journalistic no-no: that the photo was staged after Santoro’s execution.

Either way, Hussein had remarkable access to terrorists, and he routinely supplied photographs to AP that were useful propaganda for insurgents. By AP’s own admission, he dutifully waited while insurgents staged an execution scene, proving that he was an active participant in generating their propaganda.

So even if you give the Associated Press the benefit of the doubt, the best you can say is that their own evidence shows that Hussein was a willing tool of the insurgents.

Was he more than that?

Iraqi authorities will be seeking a verdict on that question soon enough.

1 February 2007 @ 7:07AM >> Yesterday, Reuters ran a story covering Fidel Castro’s health recovery under the title “Cubans relieved to see Castro on TV,” as though there are no Cubans wishing for an end to the Castro regime.

The article lauds Castro as a “firebrand” and quotes only pro-Castro citizens. Of course, on-the-record anti-Castro quotes may be hard to come by, considering that, throughout the decades, many tens of thousands of Castro critics have ended up imprisoned and executed. Yet this fact is conveniently omitted from the article; instead, the author tries to paint a picture of widespread respect for the dictator:

Whether they support his government or not, Cubans widely admire Castro, the only leader they have known since he took power in a 1959 revolution and turned Cuba into the Western Hemisphere’s only communist state.

The reporter provides no support for her assertion that “Cubans widely admire Castro” and does not mention of the fact that, far from admiring Castro, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled his regime over the years, many of them risking death in rickety rafts just for a taste of freedom.

Not to be outdone in the blatant bias department, a competitor of Reuters published a piece whose opening sentence is so slanted that it requires no further comment. The Associated Press reports:

The House passed a $463.5 billion spending bill Wednesday that covers about one-sixth of the federal budget as Democrats cleared away the financial mess they inherited from Republicans.

(Hat tip: The Corner.)

21 January 2007 >> At the end of last year, I wrote about the elusive Jamil Hussein, a supposed Iraqi police captain quoted in at least 61 stories by the Associated Press. A number of bloggers digging into the story started expressing skepticism about Hussein after various governmental instutitions in Iraq found no one with that name working in the police force. AP has since admitted that the name attributed in their stories was in fact a pseudonym, even though no such acknowledgement was ever made in the many stories in which he was quoted.

Recently, Michelle Malkin went to Iraq to investigate the story that led to the questions surrounding Jamil Hussein. Her report, published in the New York Post, indicates that AP’s troubles go far beyond the true name of Jamil Hussein:

[O]ne story [Jamil Hussein] told the AP just doesn’t check out: The Sunni mosques that as Hussein claimed and AP reported as “destroyed,” “torched” and “burned and [blown] up” are all still standing. So the credibility of every AP story relying on Jamil Hussein remains dubious.

Let’s take it from the beginning.

When the AP ran its headline-grabbing and horrifying account of alleged atrocities in Baghdad last Thanksgiving, its main source was an Iraqi police captain, one Jamil Hussein.

[...]

AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll indignantly attacked those who had questioned the global news organization’s reporting: “I never quite understood why people chose to disbelieve us about this particular man on this particular story,” she told Editor and Publisher. “AP runs hundreds of stories a day, and has run thousands of stories about things that have happened in Iraq.”

Well, Bryan Preston and I visited the area during our Iraq trip last week. Several mosques did, in fact, come under attack by Mahdi Army forces. But the “destroyed” mosques all still stand. Iraqi and U.S. Army officials say that two of them received no fire damage whatsoever. Another, which we filmed, was abandoned and empty when it was attacked.

We obtained summary reports and photos filed at the time by Iraqi and U.S. Army troops on the scene. They contain no corroborating evidence of Hussein’s claim that “Shiite militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene.”

One of the mosques identified by the AP, the Nidaa Alah mosque, had been abandoned and vacant at the time it was hit with small-arms fire, say Iraqi and U.S. Army officials. Two of its inside rooms were burned out by a lobbed firebomb, according to an Army report.

Three other mosques in the area - the al Muhaymin, al Mushahiba and Ahbab Mustafa mosques - sustained small-arms fire damage to their exteriors; the Mustafa mosque also had two rooms burned out by a firebomb.

Contrary to Hussein and the AP’s account, military reports note that Iraqi Army battalion members were on the scene - pursuing attackers, securing the area, calling the fire department, providing support and an outer cordon.

Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post was able to confirm AP’s story.

The AP quoted one corroborating witness, Imad al-Hasimi, a Sunni elder in Hurriya, who “confirmed Hussein’s account” of the immolated Sunnis on Al-Arabiya television. When Al-Hasimi later recanted, AP implied that it was due to pressure from Iraqi government officials. The other possibility: He recanted because it wasn’t true.

Capt. Aaron Kaufman of Task Force Justice, which works closely with the Iraqi Army battalion that was on the scene and monitored events as they happened, told us: “It was blown way out of proportion, there was nobody lit on fire.”

Capt. Stacy Bare, the civil-affairs officer who took us on patrol in Hurriya, concurred: “There were no six Sunnis burned.”

---

Update: Michelle Malkin has posted a video report containing images of the still-standing mosques that were supposedly “destroyed.”

18 January 2007 @ 9:02AM >> On July 27, 1997, the Senate voted by a margin of 95-0 that the United States would not sign a treaty structured like the Kyoto Protocol. That treaty, which proponents claimed would improve the environment, had harsher economic penalties for the United States than it did for countries like China, even though 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China.

As a result of the Senate’s lopsided vote, President Clinton never bothered to submit the Kyoto Protocol for ratification. So it seems a bit strange that the Associated Press would claim:

The United States is no longer bound by Kyoto, which the Bush administration rejected after taking office in 2001.

First of all, the United States was never bound by Kyoto. And the reason the U.S. was never bound by Kyoto is because the treaty was never ratified. President Clinton never even submitted it for ratification. Why didn’t he? Because every Senator—Republican and Democrat alike—who voted on the 1997 resolution made it clear that they would oppose ratifying Kyoto.

All of this took place years before President Bush was in office, but it seems that AP is more concerned with blaming Bush than getting its facts straight.

(Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds.)

29 December 2006 @ 12:54PM >> Another media scandal refuses to die:

The AP claims [Jamil] Hussein is a captain in the Iraqi police force and works in the Baghdad region. Between April and November, he was used as a source in 61 AP stories. In one of his last starring roles, he provided an account of an alleged Shiite militia attack on a Sunni mosque in Baghdad on Nov. 24.

According to that AP dispatch, 50 men blew open the front of a mosque and dragged six Sunni worshippers outside, where they poured kerosene on the six and set them on fire. If true, the story would seem to be yet another incident that reflects badly on the U.S. efforts in Iraq. It feeds the media-generated perception that Iraq is a Vietnamlike quagmire from which we cannot escape.

There’s evidence, however, that the story might have been embellished, because Capt. Jamil Hussein of the Iraqi police force may not exist. U.S. military officials told the AP in a letter that they checked out the captain and were told by the Iraqi Interior Ministry that no one by the name of Jamil Hussein works there or as a police officer.

Armed forces officials also said the U.S. was unable to confirm the media reports that the six Sunnis were burned to death. Military officials further said in the days after the alleged incident that neither Iraqi police nor coalition forces had reports of the event.

So far, no Iraqi authorities have been able to confirm the existence of Jamil Hussein, a man the Associated Press says is an Iraqi police captain. Nor have any authorities been able to confirm the story of six Sunnis being dragged from a mosque and burned to death. And despite a month of investigation into this story, the Associated Press has still been unable to prove he even exists, despite their continued insistence that he does.

More made up news from the establishment media? As each day passes with no sign of Jamil Hussein, that’s looking more and more likely.

13 December 2006 >> Some thoughts on the future of newspapers from The Atlantic Monthly:

[T]op reporters and columnists at major newspapers are realizing (or will realize soon) that their fates are not necessarily tied to those of their employers. As portals and search engines and blogs increasingly allow readers to consume media without context or much branding, writers like Thomas Friedman will increasingly wonder what is the benefit of working for a newspaper—especially when the newspaper is burying his article behind a subscriber wall. It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists-like cooperatives to financially support their independent efforts.

So what should newspapers do? They could stop printing. It may happen eventually, or perhaps newsprint will find a financially sustainable market among the elite and elderly (or perhaps it will have a nostalgic vogue not unlike that of, say, heirloom tomatoes), but that’s not what I’m getting at. The current Web-publishing model that newspapers are using isn’t likely to become financially viable anytime soon. With few exceptions, the media businesses thriving on the Web either are low-cost blog-like efforts or follow a many-to-many model, in which communities create, share, and consume content. Publishing an article on the Web gets you one click; getting your users to write the article for you gets you a thousand clicks, and costs less to boot. In other words, turning your users into contributors increases their engagement with your site—each click is, after all, also an “ad impression”—while simultaneously generating more content that you in turn can sell to advertisers.

That, I’d venture, is how you start rethinking the newspaper business. Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms. To take but one example, Kelefa Sanneh is the pop-music critic for The New York Times. He is very likely the best music critic in the country, and certainly the best new Times music writer in years. Let’s say that Sanneh creates his own community around the music he likes. Or The Washington Post’s Dana Priest creates an interactive online universe around her intelligence reportage. With editorial oversight only for libel and factual accuracy, Sanneh or Priest are allowed to do whatever they want on their sites (while their mother ships pour their resources into marketing them). In Sanneh’s case, allow other people to write music reviews under the Times/Sanneh “brand.” In Priest’s case, turn the site into a clearinghouse for global intelligence information, rumors, conspiracy theories, and so forth (obligatory disclaimer: “The views of posters do not necessarily represent those of the Washington Post Company”). Go even further: incentivize the critics and reporters by allowing them to profit based on the popularity of their sites; make it worth their while to stick around.

[...]

Playing this logic out, the next task would be uniting the Sanneh or Priest site to the Times or Post whole. You could essentially self-syndicate, sending your regular Times or Post headlines to Sanneh’s and Priest’s sites, luring readers back to the mother ship while increasing the number of times each story is read. Indeed, the logic could be (and in some circles already is being) played out even further. What if you essentially exploded the central function of the newspaper and “microchunked” (to borrow a current term) the content, syndicating all of it to bloggers or other news sites in return for a share of any advertising revenue each site generates? The Associated Press has made this the centerpiece of its digital-age strategy: it recently signed a potentially breakthrough deal with Google, in which Google will pay the AP for access to its stories; and the AP has launched a broadband player that Web sites can use to access AP video content. Its content goes where the readers are, and the AP gets paid, no matter what. Remarkably, this most old-school of services is a lone bright spot in the MSM landscape. The AP’s revenues have increased from more than $593 million in 2003 to more than $654 million in 2005; its digital revenue grew at a rate of 66 percent from 2004 to 2006. Of course, the AP has always been a syndicator, so no conceptual leap of faith (indeed no leap whatsoever) was required to move the business from analog to digital.

12 September 2006 >> Not only did Saddam Hussein have CNN’s chief news executive covering for him, it now appears that Saddam had a spy inside the Associated Press who was supplying the Iraqi dictator with information on U.N. weapons inspection plans.

AP bills itself as “the backbone of the world’s information system serving thousands of daily newspaper, radio, television and online customers” and “is the largest and oldest news organization in the world, serving as a source of news, photos, graphics, audio and video for more than one billion people a day.”

An organization that large is vulnerable to infiltration, and a lone Iraqi spy inside AP is not necessarily a sign of a systemic problem. Still, it makes you wonder who else has infiltrated the world’s big media outlets, and whether they’re having any effect on coverage. (In the case of AP rival Reuters, we already know the answer.)

9 August 2006 @ 5:59PM >> Reuters isn’t the only outfit publishing questionable photos that just so happen to benefit Hizbollah’s propaganda campaign.

One Lebanese woman is shown in two pictures from two different locations taken two weeks apart, but in each picture, she is said to be mourning the destruction of her home:

In the first photograph, taken by Reuters, a woman is seen in front of a bombed out building in Beirut. “A Lebanese woman wails after looking at the wreckage of her apartment, in a building, that was demolished by the Israeli attacks in southern Beirut,” Reuters said in its caption. The photo was dated July 22 2006.

A second photograph of a woman who looks exactly like the woman in the first Reuters image, even bearing the same scar on her left cheek, is then supplied by the Associated Press.

“A Lebanese woman reacts at the destruction after she came to inspect her house in the suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon,” the Associated Press caption claimed. The date accompanying the photograph is August 5 2006, and the scenes behind the woman are different to those of the July 22 photo.

The New York Times also got into the act with a different transgression—but quickly issued a correction after being found out. The correction reads:

A picture caption with an audio slide show on July 27 about an Israeli attack on a building in Tyre, Lebanon, imprecisely described the situation in the picture. The man pictured, who had been seen in previous images appearing to assist with the rescue effort, was injured during that rescue effort, not during the initial attack, and was not killed.

The correct description was this one, which appeared with that picture in the printed edition of The Times: After an Israeli airstrike destroyed a building in Tyre, Lebanon, yesterday, one man helped another who had fallen and was hurt.

I guess the Times figured out that there’s quite a difference between being killed and falling down.

Although the Times corrected this issue quickly, last Saturday, the paper ran a front-page above-the-fold photo from Adnan Hajj, the Reuters photographer busted (and fired) for passing along doctored pictures.

Reuters felt that Hajj’s work was questionable enough to remove all 920 photos he submitted from their catalog, but the Times still has not even mentioned the Reuters photo scandal or otherwise explained the paper’s use of his photos.