by Deb Cupples | According to Editor & Publisher, the Tribune Company (which owns nine daily newspaper, including the Chicago Tribune and LA Times) has decided to drop its subscription for Associated Press wire services.
The reported reason is AP's new (higher) pricing scheme. Me, I wonder why the quality of AP's articles wasn't listed as part of the reason.
In August, for example, I pointed out an AP writer's misleading story about Florida's and Michigan's problems during the Democratic primaries. I call it "misleading," because some pretty important facts were left out of the article. You can read about it here.
Back in May, Tom in Paine pointed out either bias or lack or knowledge on the part of AP writer Nedra Pickler, when she covered a story about Michigan and Florida: Paine commented:
"The latest example is from an Associated Press writer named Nedra Pickler.Her most recent application to rise in the ranks of America's journalistic politburo is a piece about Florida and Michigan on May 28th.
In an article under a byline by the Associated Press (which is showing every day the need to rename their wire service the Disassociated Press since they are getting further and further from reality) Pickler tells us that according to Democratic lawyers seating the entire Florida and Michigan delegates may be illegal."
Ms. Pickler failed to cite an actual law that the DNC would have violated by seating Florida's full delegation. Furthermore, the DNC's own "Delegate Selection Rules" (Rule 21-c-7) made it possible for the DNC to fully seat Florida's delegation under the particular set of facts (I'm not sure about Michigan).
All AP writers covering that issue should have read the DNC's rules before drawing conclusions . I don't know if Ms. Pickler's questionable conclusion stemmed from bias on her part or from her blind copying of interviewees' conclusions.
Neither failure is acceptable in a journalist.
In 2006,Sonoma State University released a study about bias in AP "news" reports.
Also in 2006, Op Ed News wrote about a biased article by AP writer Andrew Taylor.
More recently, you can read criticism about AP star-writer Ron Fournier's seemingly anti-Obama or pro-McCain reporting here and here.
I could go on all night listing examples. Instead, I'll leave it to you to search Google, using the terms "Associated Press" and "bias" -- which rendered more than 1.6 million search results.
If you go through a few pages of search results, you'll find some interesting stuff (though, some of it may not be anything more than opinion).
Note: there's nothing wrong with editorialists who allow their personal opinions to infiltrate their articles -- as long as they don't try to pass themselves off as objective reporters.
News reporters, however, are supposed to remove their personal opinions from their reporting.
All that said, I'm surprised that The Tribune Company didn't cite questionable quality of work as a reason that the company intends to drop its AP subscription.
Memeorandum has commentary.
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