Posted on 12/03/2006 4:18:27 AM PST by Radix
When a company defrauds its customers, or delivers shoddy goods, the customers sooner or later are going to take their business elsewhere. But if that company has a virtual monopoly, and offers something its customers must have, they may have no choice but to keep taking it.
That’s when the customers, en masse, need to raise a stink. That’s when someone else with the resources needs to seriously consider whether the time is ripe to compete.
The Associated Press is embroiled in a scandal. Conservative bloggers, the new media watchdogs, lifted a rock at the AP.
Curt at Floppingaces, www.floppingaces2.blogspot.com, led the charge. He thought there was something strange about an AP report, and took a second look at it, then a third look. He and others blew the lid off it. The AP is making up war crimes. But the resulting stink in the blogosphere has barely wrinkled a nose in the mainstream press. The ethics-obsessed Poynter Institute seems to be oblivious to it.
It has to do with the AP’s Iraqi stringers and an oft-quoted Iraqi police captain named Jamil Hussein. Problem is, the Iraqi police say Capt. Hussein does not exist. The Iraqi police and U.S. military say an incident described in an AP report - Iraqi soldiers standing by as people were burned alive in a mosque - didn’t happen. Another AP-reported incident, U.S. soldiers shooting 11 civilians, also never happened, the military says.
When the AP was forced to acknowledge this situation, it did so in a story about a new Interior Ministry policy regarding false reports. The AP buried the fact that its own false report prompted this new policy.
The AP stands by its reporting.. The AP has cast “Capt. Jamil Hussein” simply as someone not authorized to speak, and AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll has sniffed morally: “Good reporting relies on more than government-approved sources.”
The AP has another Iraqi stringer problem. Photographer Bilal Hussein is in U.S. custody, and the AP has been clamoring indignantly for his release. AP reports have buried the U.S. explanation that Hussein is being held without charge because - quite aside from producing photos that showed him to be overly intimate with terrorists in Fallujah - he was in an al-Qaeda bomb factory, with an al-Qaeda bombmaker, with traces of explosives on his person when he was arrested.
The AP, of course, has been delivering unbalanced reports about U.S. national politics for some time, as when President Bush, whom AP reporters despise, is barely allowed to state his case on an issue before his critics are given twice as much space to pummel him. The AP, once a just-the-facts news delivery service, has lost its rudder. It has become a partisan, anti-American news agency that seeks to undercut a wartime president and American soldiers in the field. It is providing fraudulent, shoddy goods. It doesn’t even recognize it has a problem.
This is the point at which, another big American industry learned, people start buying Japanese. But as an American newspaper, if you want to provide your readers with affordable regional, national and international news, you have to deal with the AP.
If newspapers don’t have an alternative, readers do. It’s called the Internet. That’s why newspapers, if they don’t want to be dragged further into irrelevance and disrepute, have to tell The Associated Press they are dissatisfied with its product.
I've said it before and I'll say it again...
ap=al qaeda press
LLS
Their problem integral to the structure of the organization. They probably cannot be reformed. They need to be replaced. As demand for a less agenda driven, biased source of news increases, a way to replace them will be found.
ap = mouthpiece of the lib/dem anti-americans that support al-queda socialist/communist - anything/everything anti-american!!!
I hope Howie Carr covers this too! If some of us in New England bring it up he may.
The Tax Exempt Foundation, alias --Poynter, seems to be oblivious to it as it is to anything that does not match their Totally Liberal view of the world as exemplified by the 'newspaper' it owns known as the St.Pete Times (or slimes- if you read it)...... ..............However, both the tax exempt foundation and the Times practice 'diversity' and so are exempt from criticism.............
You're right. There's not many choices.
You've got Reuters, and we saw how biased they are during the Israeli-Hezbollah war.
And you've got United Press International. They're owned by the Moonies.
I think we need objective news gathering according to different, more positive criteria. It is not good for any of us to fill our minds with garbage everyday and exault the bad guys all of the time. The airwaves are filled with notoriety while the real movers and shakers remain unknown and anonymous. How else would the proposition that completely unqualified dudes be president even be raised.
AP just got punched in the nose by a paper that is in its corner.
Yep and besides Ass Press being ubiquitous, they're basically a monopoly now.
UPI is almost non existent, a shell of its former self. Rooter's HQ is in London and they hate America. AFP, fugetaboutit - they're frogs and hate America too. Plus all the major newspapers pretty much shut down their Foreign Bureaus and wire services to nothing. I 'believe' the NY Slimes is the only one remaining with anything resembling a 'full staff'.
Maybe we should let Al Jazeera open here?
It would provide balance for the biased AP (semi joking. and I mean 'semi').
Ok, wave a wand and make all those organizations go away. Where you going to get your news - - Rush Limbaugh? Just about everything you read, watch or listen to, uses some form of news service. Like I said, I'll take mine raw. It'll evenutally get corrected if it needs to be.
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