AP’s Potential Right-wing Bias
By John Lorenz
This is the second instance that I’ve found today alone of the Associated Press masquerading partisan editorializing as hard, objective news reports. The second example of such violation of the standards of objectivity that are supposed to apply appeared on Yahoo News on the day of Biden’s being named Obama’s Vice Presidential pick.
The first example of Associated Press partisan bias in reporting the news came earlier the same day. An hour after the announcement of Biden being picked, in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep, I found the announcement from Barack Obama’s campaign of his V.P. pick in my email because I have been a supporter of the Obama campaign.
I went on to look over the Yahoo News headlines on my main browser page, and there I saw a headline that caught my eye. Among the other news headlines was an Associated Press article that looked like a hit piece on Obama because it proclaimed “Choice of Biden Shows (Obama) lack of Confidence.” This sort of angered me because even on the face of it, it looked unfair. As it turned out, it was “analysis” written by Associated Press Washington Bureau Chief, Ron Fournier. So I “Googled” Ron Fournier and with a little bit of sleuthing, found out that Ron Fournier became notorious during Congressional hearings into Karl Rove, in that this Bureau Chief appeared in emails to Rove expressing friendship and solidarity with Rove. Fournier, the writer of this hit piece on Obama’s pick for VP is, not coincidentally, a Karl Rove buddy.
Then I found the second hit on Obama-Biden when another Associated Press story appeared on the Yahoo News headline line-up regarding Biden’s “first appearance speech” in Springfield, in which Biden attacked John McCain and his being a continuation of George W. Bush’s policies.
In this second so-called ‘news story’ I noted that the author, AP’s Liz Sidoti, was “reporting” on the high points of what Biden said, but after each statement of Biden’s criticizing McCain, Ms. Sidoti immediately interwove an objection to what Biden had said, apparently feeling the need to ‘counterbalance’ Biden with ‘extenuating facts’ in defense of McCain. Either she did that, or else she would insert editorializing of her own about how Biden’s assertions “left out important facts” that should be considered, as she saw it, in exoneration of McCain or feeling the need to attack Biden’s accusations.
I did a little bit of Internet sleuthing once again, and “Googled” AP press writer, Liz Sidoti and I came across a blogger’s comment in which he mentioned Ms. Sidoti’s hit piece a while back when she attacked Obama for opting out of public campaign financing. This time, disguised once again as Associated Press ‘analysis’ Liz Sidoti slammed Obama’s decision to forsake public campaign financing, being very sanctimonious in her article. She conspicuously failed to include any counterbalancing information exposing John McCain’s wrongdoing in illegally attempting to remove himself from the campaign finance system after financially benefitting from it, which was supposed to be punishable by five years in jail. The ‘analysis’ of Ms. Sidoti left that information out of her hit piece on Obama. As a post script, I recently read the news that McCain has since been miraculously let off the hook for his violation of campaign law. It turned out that Ms. Sidoti knew about McCain’s campaign finance scandal because the news had come out just two days before her hit piece on Obama. But she didn’t interweave any defense of Obama into her ‘analysis,’ nor did she criticize McCain for his wrongdoing like she did when she wrote about Joe Biden’s speech where she jumped to the defense of McCain in her ‘reporting’. Continued…
Upon further research, Karl Rove had exchanged emails with AP’s Ron Fournier the day the news broke of Cpl. Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire indicating an allegiance. Fournier, now the wire service’s D.C. bureau chief, stating in one of the emails, “Because I’m on your side.” Ron Fournier did not write any articles on the Tillman death.
Now to be fair, I will not say unequivocally AP has a right-wing bias because that would be a sweeping generalization. I will say that the assumption by some that the AP has a left-wing bias is a prevarication and in Republicanese translates into, “This article isn’t nice towards us, therefore let’s attack the messenger to undermine the article and ignore the facts.”
