Upset with AP. A July 16 story from Associated Press about Voice of America officials complaining that Cuba was jamming US satellite broadcasts to Iran included this statement by the reporter:
It's hard to know where to begin explaining the problems with this.
It is an unmeasured, uncritical presentation of government spin as fact. It gives unearthed weight to the myth that there is a free American press, and everything presented in it is the truth. It reduces AP to the role of shill for the official government line.
This is particularly upsetting because the AP provides most of the news offered by most of the newspapers and in the US. As a result it has a special responsibility to strive as best it can to view propaganda skeptically, be careful to label opinions as opinion and strive to be as fair and truthful as as possible.
Staff writers for individual papers may be given some latitude to present stories in a fashion reflecting the editorial policies of the publisher. Astute readers would know in advance they should bear that in mind when evaluating stories.
But as a wire service AP has bas a broader obligation to maintain balance in its news stories.
This is not the first time such unbalanced unskeptical writings have cropped in the AP content in recent months. It's an upsetting trend. What happened? Did Murdoch buy AP, too> If he or a similarly ideologue did, then we're in trouble. UPI was bought by Sun Myung Moon and sullied that wire service as a balanced source. There's Reuters, of course, and AFP. But if AP continues to deteriorate like this, we'll all be tuning in the BBC for unspun news, the way people in occupied countries had to when Hitler controlled Europe during World War II.
Iran's Islamic government has accused US-based satellite stations of stoking unrest by providing unfiltered information into a country that does not otherwise have a free press.
It's hard to know where to begin explaining the problems with this.
It is an unmeasured, uncritical presentation of government spin as fact. It gives unearthed weight to the myth that there is a free American press, and everything presented in it is the truth. It reduces AP to the role of shill for the official government line.
This is particularly upsetting because the AP provides most of the news offered by most of the newspapers and in the US. As a result it has a special responsibility to strive as best it can to view propaganda skeptically, be careful to label opinions as opinion and strive to be as fair and truthful as as possible.
Staff writers for individual papers may be given some latitude to present stories in a fashion reflecting the editorial policies of the publisher. Astute readers would know in advance they should bear that in mind when evaluating stories.
But as a wire service AP has bas a broader obligation to maintain balance in its news stories.
This is not the first time such unbalanced unskeptical writings have cropped in the AP content in recent months. It's an upsetting trend. What happened? Did Murdoch buy AP, too> If he or a similarly ideologue did, then we're in trouble. UPI was bought by Sun Myung Moon and sullied that wire service as a balanced source. There's Reuters, of course, and AFP. But if AP continues to deteriorate like this, we'll all be tuning in the BBC for unspun news, the way people in occupied countries had to when Hitler controlled Europe during World War II.
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