Uncriical AP Coverage Helped Push Cheney Spin On Iraq

The conservative spin after Vice President Dick Cheney's June 19 comments at the National Press Club was that he was being honest with the American people, telling us that he wrongly underestimated the strength of the Iraqi insurgency.

But take a closer look at what Cheney said, and you see that this one obvious nod to reality was part of a larger set of comments that can only be described as spin, spin and more spin.

<snip>

The Associated Press' coverage, widely carried in newspapers nationwide, also used the Cheney spin without fact-checking it.

To read more, click here.

... if no one fact checks him.

...years ago. Some of the Newspapers and reporters that are members of the AP still good, but some of the AP members are just Crap flingers.

If I see a "too good to be true" story by AP, or a story with a clear or possible bias, it's always good to Google the story or the reporter or both.

Another thing to watch out about the AP is, they allow edited reprinting of a reporters story. Editing that often removes qualifying statements and biases the edited story. The easiest way to find these is to look for the "by line," if it's missing or abbreviated, I usually Google the headline to find the original. If that doesn't work, Google one of the person quoted or a quote in the article.

I wish they would make these edited stories illegal.

The only change was the headline, of course, and the length of the story. The version I linked to, I believe, is the full story and unchanged from the original. A lot of papers ran briefer versions, which might be worse -- you get that Cheney defended his "last throes" comment in the first paragraph, but no explanation why.

When an editor is trying to fit a story into a limited space in an actual Printed on News Print Newspaper, that's one thing, but on-line versions of a Newspaper claiming they have to edit out the last few paragraphs of an AP story on a web page, that's just BS.

The bandwidth difference between 2 paragraphs of text and 6-10 paragraphs of text is so small, it's not even worth considering. And more and more these days, writers and editors "bury the leads" in the last 2 or 3 paragraph of a News Story, so these edited stories are often very misleading. If a story just feels "long" O.K., but these days, those last 2 or 3 paragraphs hold important info.

Sorry, I guess it's a little off topic, but AP, UPI, and News Corp editing and re-posting articles on-line is a major pet-peeve of mine.

or just lazy?