Another Indication of Corrupted, Liberal Biased Press

Jules Crittenden at The Boston Herald this morning:

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, 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 fact is that AP, like ALL mainstream press orgs, have been using their position to make political points for the Democrats instead of simply reporting news. In the case of AP, it’s as Crittenden suggests:

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.

Nor do the rest of them.  And that, simply, because they don’t consider such liberal bias to be a problem, rather they consider it their mandate. 

But in a larger sense, it is time for us to understand the kind of damage that has been done in Iraq and elsewhere because of this biased “reporting”.  One of the major reasons behind the image of Iraq as a failure, and in turn, the most recent election results, is the bias of the press; the American people are not getting the real story.

I call that a corrupted press.