4.19.00
Media For Gore

4.19.00
Smart Cops Saying 'No'

4.18.00
Celebrating Earth Day — By Cutting Taxes

4.18.00
Clinton's Anti-Gun Two-Step

4.17.00
Let My People Go: Elián and the Exodus

4.14.00
Market Meltdown, Huh?

4.14.00
The Second Appomattox

4.14.00
Rapists Like GunControl

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Why You Yellow Bellied...

4.14.00
Bush Courts Gay Republicans

4.13.00
Elián: The Movie

4.12.00
Colorado Senate Rejects Gun Legislation

4.10.00
Unreliable Guns Aren't Smart

4.06.00
Will Gore Be Held Accountable?

4.06.00
Turning on Greenspan

4.04.00
Two Cheers for W.'s Environmental Message

4.04.00
A Well Endowed Democracy

4.03.00
An Unsettling Antitrust Case

4.03.00
The Ph.D. with the Lamp

4/19/00 2:45 p.m.
Media For Gore
What exactly is the Associated Press associated with?

By Tom Gnau, freelance writer

t was exactly the kind of quote an Associated Press writer wasn't about to pass up. "Come on in! Welcome!" the AP's Laura Meckler quoted science teacher Cynthia Graves saying last week, when Graves greeted Al Gore in her Charlotte, N.C. classroom. "I was just telling the kids how smart you are." How "smart" he is?

A reader won't miss the helpfully-supplied exclamation points. And the quote appeared in the story's second paragraph, right after the lead. Readers might not finish the story, but they'll see Graves's admiration.

No Republicans were given a chance to express skepticism about Gore's school day in the story. At least, the AP quoted no one to the right of a 13-year-old. But when George W. Bush visited a Cleveland job-training center last week, the AP was quick to quote a Democratic National Committee press release.

The AP gave the DNC space to say: "With a dismal job training record like his in Texas, it's no wonder that Bush had to travel to Ohio to even talk about the issue." On the day when Bush outlined his "New Prosperity Initiative" for the first time, the AP was sure to remind readers that "Gore has criticized Bush's five-year, $483-billion tax-cut proposal as a 'risky tax scheme' that leaves nothing for other government spending and Social Security."

Objectivity may not be the AP's lodestar these days. After wading through weeks of campaign coverage, readers might wonder with what, exactly, the Associated Press is associated. Examples abound. A Gore campaign aide was arrested recently in Nashville on a charge of driving under the influence, but the AP offered nary a word on the matter. Would the wire service have been as circumspect if a Bush worker were nabbed behind the wheel after a few too many Heinekens?

The AP seems to delight in trivial mistakes — if they're made on Bush's side. "George W. Bush claimed victory in Tuesday's Kansas primary with thanks to all the voters who came out to support him. One problem: the primary had been canceled in February," was the AP's lead in that piece. And trivial "successes" for the Gore camp are celebrated.

When Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider endorsed Gore, the AP couldn't wait to share the news. "To me, everything is moot if you don't have a planet to battle on," the AP quoted Snider as saying. "He's a big environmentalist. He's stood up for environmental issues in the face of a lot of hostility."

The wire service was also on top of a Texas police chief's "racially-charged" statement recently. The actual statement wasn't recent, mind you; the remark was made in October 1998, when Williams testified in a discrimination lawsuit filed by one of his officers. The chief opined that "porch monkey" wasn't a racial slur. The AP tried to tie this to Bush as far as it could. After all, Bush named Williams to head his state's nine-member Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education in November 1999, but Williams was first appointed as a member of the commission in 1997, about a year before his testimony. The AP made certain to report it all last week, in case you haven't heard about it.

Ralph Reed, a Bush strategist, may not have been driving drunk, but he has worked as a consultant for Microsoft for more than a year. AP Writer Tim Klass, recounting a New York Times story, laid it all out last week.

The AP's Scott Lindlaw noted this week that Gore raised more than $5 million over the weekend in California. "Sunday, however, the focus was on the working class," he wrote of a Los Angeles Gore rally. That kind of writing is not merely supplying context; it's bending over backwards for a candidate.

And speaking of raising money, when Bush got together for a Texas Rangers game with Enron head Kenneth Lay, a big benefactor, AP Writer Megan Stack was sure to mention "charges of political favoritism." Leaning left and liking liberals is what the media does, of course. The situation is so old, it's boring.

But it's not that the AP is skeptical of conservatives. It's that a wide-ranging news outlet ought to be skeptical, period. A campaign is a 24-hour image-making enterprise, Gore recently asked the American Society of Newspaper Editors to challenge Bush on "every assumption and question every proposal."

The AP called Gore's invitation to editors an effort to fight "encroachment on his signature issues" after Bush offered his own education, environment, and health-care proposals — as if the GOP should not dare share their own ideas on those issues. Gore doesn't have to worry. The ink-stained folks are way ahead of him.

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