I would trust AP no more that ABCNBCCBSCNNMSNBC etc., which is very little. They report, selectively. Always with and agenda in mind.
I don't see where this is anything to brag about. Liberals giving other liberals awards all the time is quite common. They do it all of the time.
The AP is the largest wire service in America. That is no accident; it has been aggressively monopolistic from its founding before the Civil War.Indeed, I saw it credibly stated - albeit on the Internet - that the AP was convicted by SCOTUS of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1945 (Chicago case). The thing is, tho, that you don’t have to be monopolistic as wire services go to nonetheless be an enabling part of “a conspiracy against the public,” as Adam Smith suggested in Wealth of Nations Simply because a wire service is a virtual meeting of “people of the same trade” of journalism.
But in the case of the AP, there additionally is its famous stylebook which is explicit guidance to journalists on how to write news reports. Journalism is criticism (bad news sells - and why did the bad things happen, anyway - weren’t the people we’re paying to prevent trouble doing their job?).
The fact that journalists are critics and not risk-takers is the fundamental reason for journalism’s inherent leftist slant. And the conspiracy-promoting tendency of the wire services magnifies the leftist tendency inherent in journalism.