(Sept. 2)
The Associated Press story announcing the hiring of a new AP executive editor gives plenty of reasons for readers not to trust the once-venerable news wire.
The AP some years ago devolved from an objective news source into just another outlet for left-leaning propaganda. Even its famous AP Stylebook, long in use in most newsrooms as the supreme arbiter of proper journalistic diction, has gone disgustingly woke , meaning left-wing. For example, it now says the words “black” and “indigenous” should be capitalized when referring to race or ethnicity, but that “white” should remain lowercase. And AP says we can’t use “thug” because it supposedly has racial connotations, and it promotes the use of the non-word “ableism” to describe negative attitudes against the disabled. And so on.
Those are mere cosmetic issues, however. Much worse is the AP’s habit of taking sides in how it “reports” political issues. For just two examples from among hundreds, it portrays conservative action on voting laws as the “Republicans’ nationwide campaign to restrict access to the ballot ” and describes an organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council as a “corporate-backed, conservative group.” These are just examples of bias, not of being factual. You’ll never find an AP story “reporting” about the “Democrats’ nationwide campaign to eliminate longstanding voter-integrity rules.” Moreover, the AP will mention the leftist Brennan Center for Justice without giving it a single ideological modifier (not “liberal,” not “progressive,” not anything) and without identifying it as an outfit funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros.
Even though the Brennan Center does at least some thoughtful, well-sourced work (as ALEC does too, by the way), why is it treated neutrally when ALEC is deliberately given negative labels over its funding sources?
In that light, the AP story announcing the promotion of longtime editor Julie Pace to the job of “executive editor” reads like a carefully constructed excuse for liberal bias…. [The full column is at this link.]
