AP: Metamorphosis into Associated Opinion Completed
The AP published a very short, but cynical article about President George W. Bush’s farewell address. The ‘news item’ should never have seen the light of day, or it should have been published as ‘opinion’ rather than ‘news,’ because the tone of it is so ludicrously anti-Bush that even Markos Moulitsas (founder of Daily Kos) would be embarrassed to see something like this being published in the name of objective reporting.
The headline reads “Bush address includes laundry list of back patting.” If that is not enough, the person who wrote the article also took some swipes at Bush in the article itself: “In his farewell address to the nation, President George W. Bush is acknowledging that many of his decisions are unpopular with the American people. But he says there can be no debate about the results.
“Indeed, a text of the speech comes with a laundry list of what Bush says are successes.”
The author concludes: “The bottom line, Bush says, is there have been good days and tough days during his term.
“On that, even his critics would agree.”
Although Dr. Steven Taylor is right when he argues that Bush’s presidency can hardly be called a success, he seems to forget in his ‘defense’ of the AP piece that reporting the news is not the same as sharing your opinion. The problem with the AP article is not that the author believes that Bush was a bad president. Rather, the problem is that he shares his opinion in a piece pretending to be an objective news report. If this was published in the ‘opinion section’ at AP, no problem, but that’s not what the Associated Press did. They published this blogpost - because that is what it is in both tone and length – as an original news report.
And so, the downfall of the ‘elite media’ continues. They are becoming increasingly subjective, thereby betraying the profession they insist they hold dear.
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Not at all–while much of my post was about my opinion of the speech and, by extension, the Bush presidency, my point about the headline specifically was that it was factually accurate. The speech was a laundry list of backpatting. Indeed, I suppose that one would expect any such speech to be such. It is simply all the more striking in the Bush case given the lack of things about which Bush can legitimately pat his own back.
Perhaps your think the word “backpatting” is overly normative, but the bottom line is that Bush did make a list of things he thinks he did successfully, which is, by definition, a laundry list of backpatting.
Even if one finds the characterization problematic, it hardly rises to the level of “Bush Derangement Syndrome” as Malkin characterized it to be.
The story itself isn’t really much of anything. I would be curious: what in the text of the story do you consider to be pure opinion? It is actually all pretty straightforward–and it is hardly anything that would Kos blush.
Dr. Taylor: All that you are really doing is showing that bias does not necessarily come from misstating facts- it can also come from the manner in which the facts are framed. Sure, it’s factually true that Bush was providing a laundry list of his accomplishments, and it’s not untrue to call that backpatting. But when is the last time that the term ‘backpatting’ was used to describe someone listing his own accomplishments (ie, patting oneself on the back) without that being considered a bit gauche? And yes, we are forgiving of backpatting in this circumstance (we generally grant the outgoing president a period of reflection which seeks to create a positive judgment), but that’s why we don’t typically use a term for it which casts it in a negative light. For instance, the AP article about Bill Clinton’s final address discussed here by Don Surber, was not given a similar headline even though that would have been just as factual.
I have to admit the AP story reads like an opinion piece. And that’s not mentioning that its brevity implies a sense of “irrelevance”
Its funny, last night my wife was watching Greta Van Sustern on Fox. Bush’s edited speech was squeezed between the plane crash in NY coverage and coverage of the mother suspected of killing her child in Florida. The Bush speech received no further commentary (the crash got a lot of breathless coverage as did the killer mom). So, in this instance, even conservative Fox saw Bush’s swan song as not particularly noteworthy.
C:
Your gripe, it would seem, would then be with reality if, in fact, the facts in the piece are accurate.
And even if one wishes to critique the tone of the piece, it still hardly rises to the level of BDS or, as Michael put it in the post, that would embarrass Kos to write. Part of the problem with charges of press bias is that they often require going overboard to make a point.
Is the tone of the piece negative? I can see that. Of course, Bush is leaving office on a very negative note (two unfinished wars, the whole economic collapse, and so forth), so it is hardly a shock that the tone of articles about his leaving are negative. Similarly, it is hardly a shock that one can find an article about Clinton leaving that was more positive than this one.
No, my gripe is that facts can and should be reported in as neutral a manner as possible without editorializing. This is something that I was taught in, I believe, 7th grade, and should be as basic as it gets when understanding media bias. We learned that journalists should use words that convey as little emotion as possible: never use ’slaughter’ when ‘kill’ will do, never use ‘brutal’ but instead describe an event or scene in neutral language and then allow the reader to determine what emotional context applies to the situation.
Sadly, these basic tenets of journalism seem to no longer be taught in J school even though I learned them in middle school.
I take no issue with your opinion that Bush is leaving on a negative note and is extremely unpopular, nor with your expression of that in a context that is meant to be an opinion piece. But a straight news piece should be held to a different standard of neutrality; if the facts support that unpopularity, then that conclusion will be reached by the reader instead of having that opinion spoon fed to him/her by the ‘reporter’. In other words, there’s a difference between judging whether or not a news piece expresses an opinion which is supported by fact or judging whether it ought to be expressing opinion at all. You admit that the tone was negative and I’m simply arguing that ‘tone’ should always be neutral in news reporting even when the facts aren’t neutral.
And please don’t misunderstand- I don’t agree with the degree of criticism that Malkin applied here either. This was a rather minor example of bias, not rising to the level of BDS (although as part of a larger body of AP reporting, it provides one data point for that phenomenon.)
O, come on Stephen. All of us, especially bloggers, now that the way in which you put things, the way you word them, the context, etc. is incredibly important in an article; it’s something we spend a lot of time on. We know the tricks to get our message across. The thing is; as a blogger you can, as a journalist you can’t.
@Steven Taylor
Steven;
Your response only confirms my opinion. If I hear you correctly, he’s been bad so the “news piece” is appropriate in couching things in negative terms. There’s a word for that ….hmmm…. Oh yeah: Bias
(PS and I’m the moderate here, so you’re not winning any converts)
Associated Press -> Associated Bloggers?
Fear not, though, since liberal isn’t the only bias at the AP. Just ask Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier, who’s in favor of this style of “reporting.”