Eric Boehlert: The AP's colossal campaign failure

[babylonsister]

https://pressrun.media/p/the-aps-colossal-campaign-failure

The AP's colossal campaign failure
Trump's "dueling reality"
Eric Boehlert


The Associated Press kicked off the unofficial start of the presidential general election over the Labor Day weekend with a dreadful news piece that perfectly captured everything that's gone wrong with political news reporting in the age of Trump.

Embracing Both Sides journalism and injecting it with steroids, the AP suggested Joe Biden and Trump are offering "dueling version of reality" this campaign and that voters simply have to choose which one they believe. It represents another disturbing example of the AP embracing GOP talking points.

From Steve People's, the AP's chief political reporter:

On the campaign trail with President Donald Trump, the pandemic is largely over, the economy is roaring back, and murderous mobs are infiltrating America’s suburbs. With Democrat Joe Biden, the pandemic is raging, the economy isn’t lifting the working class, and systemic racism threatens Black lives across America.

The AP stressed the "dizzyingly different versions of reality" offered by the two candidates, and that their "conflicting messages carry at least a sliver of truth, some much more than others."

Incredibly, the AP never informs readers which "version" of reality is accurate (Biden), and which one is a complete fabrication (Trump). And the AP never details what "sliver of truth" is attached to Trump's claim that the pandemic is basically over. For the AP, the news story is that Biden and Trump are painting different portraits of America — that's what's defining the campaign.

At a time when the nation desperately needs clear-headed campaign reporting as the incumbent abandons all traditions and guidelines for a presidential campaign, the AP provides the opposite — a Both Sides bonanza that helps Trump muddy the waters.

snip//

We have eight weeks until Election Day. News outlets and consumers all over the country are depending on the AP to produce trustworthy campaign coverage that does not shy away from telling the truth about Trump. Claiming he and Biden offer "dueling views of reality" represents a colossal failure.

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. AP either has been bought off or are part of something bad here, or something else, they KNOW that

comment is a lie and their approach may cause the end of the country.

I am stunned that they are doing this.

[DENVERPOPS]

30. That's what happens

when 80+% if the U.S. News Media is owned by Republicans...........

[calimary]

46. Indirectly, in the case of the AP.

The Associated Press is a cooperative. It's not a corporation as we've come to know them. It's owned by its members. There's a governing board comprised of representatives from the member stations and newspapers.

At least when I worked at the AP that was the structure.

There's a separate union structure, too - when I was still working there, we were all members of what was called the Wire Service Guild. Totally separate from the unions that governed the conventional broadcast/cable networks and stations - (AFTRA - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which eventually became SAG/AFTRA when it merged with the Screen Actors Guild). Sometime after I left they changed it from the Wire Service Guild to the Media Guild, as the internet expanded and soon came to redefine a whole lot in the media world.

That, of course, doesn't obscure the fact that those station managers and owners may very well be republi-CONS, so they will be a factor. But they don't own the AP.

[DENVERPOPS]

47. Thank you Calimary

I learned something, thanks.

Back in the late 80's, early 90's I had a good friend who was a major journalist in Europe. Time and time again, he would send me two articles on an event. One was how Europe (and most of the world) was reporting on the event. And the second article was how the entire U.S. Major Media was reporting the exact same event.

He did this many times, not in a nasty vindictive way, but just to alert me to the fact that our news was in fact being censored.

Our "Invasion of Panama" was an excellent example of what we here in the U.S. were told in all the U.S. Media, versus what the rest of the free world was reporting. It was a glaring example of censorship, in fact it was a real eye opener and downright frightening.
He also sent me an award winning documentary on video about the Panama Invasion that prompted the U.N to launch an investigation into the invasion. He had to get a copy, get someone to convert it to the video format used in the U.S., and then send it to me.
For some reason the video never was for sale in America.........

A good title for a book that summarized the past forty years, (If the title hadn't already been used) would be:

"WHILE AMERICANS SLEPT"............

I honestly and sincerely believe that in the next three months we are about to see a catastrophe here in the U.S. A catastrophe, the likes of nothing we have ever seen in U.S. History and could never have imagined.............

WASF

[Montelimar]

2. They're setting the tone

to rake in some big cash in a short period of time.

Modern "infotainment" does not have the public interest in mind.

[calimary]

34. Welcome to DU, Montelimar!

It's disappointing as all-get-out!

I can fully understand the attempt to be objective. When the guy starts in the new job. Give him a few months. Give him a year. "He'll grow into it. You just watch..."

And now it's almost four years later and we know WAY too much to keep giving him the benefit of the doubt. To keep hitting the reset button and going back to the starting block again assuming you can make like it's a brand new clean slate.

And it ISN'T!!![/i] We've seen enough by now. We've heard enough by now. We've read enough by now. NO MORE benefit of the doubt. The ONLY thing that anyone has to work with here is the supremely well-documented fact that this is the guy WHO LIES ALL THE TIME. He just lies and lies and lies and lies and lies. All his life. All the doggone live-long-day.

[Montelimar]

36. Thank you for the welcome!

agree agree agree!

[NRaleighLiberal]

3. the media are in their own bubble of $$$ . it's only about $$$.

[Sherman A1]

41. Precisely

It’s all about ad revenue.

[stopdiggin]

4. Didn't find the AP nearly as off the mark

as the OP did. Nor nearly as much as they perhaps have been in the past.
Here's the quote again:

The AP stressed the "dizzyingly different versions of reality" offered by the two candidates, and that their "conflicting messages carry at least a sliver of truth, some much more than others."

Any objective read of the above ....

Some of us have come to think that there is no such thing as balanced reporting or news anymore. Not sure if that is a productive direction.

[mountain grammy]

8. I think they're afraid of consequences if Trump stays in office.

So they’re doing a balancing act which is not, in my opinion, balanced reporting.

[jaxexpat]

10. It was unnecessary, day-glo, terminology, plain to see. AP are not the informers anymore.

They are the dis-informers. The dark side is the dark side is the dark side is what it is.
They approached the article by comparing a salmon to a silverfish. Then editorializing their commonalities, "they are both examples of the same evolutionary process that put the first men on the moon and wrote, War and Peace". When credible logic is nowhere to be found, like Alice, we must simply acknowledge "It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!"

AND it's about time that every effort be made to see it finally adjourned.

[stopdiggin]

33. no idea what that means, but -

right on, man!
----- ----- -----

[NewJeffCT]

42. the headline is extremely deceptive

yes, the article may be different. Many more people will see the headline than click on the story & read it.

It is NOT dueling realities - It is a duel between reality and fantasy/fake news/propaganda or whatever works as a headline. (Truth vs Lies/Facts vs Fiction)

[Faux pas]

5. WTFF???

We be screwn

[Laelth]

6. k&r for visibility. Well said. n/t

-Laelth

[Pepsidog]

7. Very disturbing reporting.

[iluvtennis]

9. Mainstream media only cares about having a "horse race" to feed their ratings and hence

revennues. They don't seem to be nterested in just giving the facts.

[DallasNE]

14. Exactly

A sporting event has a referee to moderate the action and call balls and strikes. Political campaigns need the same. They call the balls and strikes by fact checking the messages. Right now they aren’t even trying to fulfill that mission and money is the reason

[iluvtennis]

15. Spot on! nt

[DENVERPOPS]

48. Good call DNE

Your analogy to refs........!!!!!!

Time and time again, in watching games in every sport we have quite literally seen refs throw a game with a ludicrous call and wondered who was paying them........

[BigDemVoter]

11. Thank you.

I will never read another AP article again.

[bucolic_frolic]

12. I find AP a colossal failure at all times

Empty journalism that steps back from the story to put it into words that will get no one upset. It's like news on tranquilizers. What freaks me out is this is nothing new, and this is the news I grew up on, in the papers each day. Information flow was so poor back then, and this is what we relied on for national and regional news.

[budkin]

13. All media is terrified of being labeled as LIBERAL

This is due to 40+ years of being accused of it. The GOP strategy really paid off!

[OMGWTF]

16. I remind people that the media is only as liberal as its corporate owners.

[erronis]

20. The GOP strategy was to take a perfectly reasonable term - liberal, and make it into a slander.

They've done it with many other terms and concepts such as "democrat", "socialist", "progressive", "intellectual", "academic".

I'm sure it was around before McCarthy and Roy Cohn but it lives on. Rove, Gingrich, Atwater, Cheney, bald guy in the WH, etc.

[maxrandb]

17. Please don't get mad at me when I say

that when this shitshow is over, there needs to be some Nuremberg style Tribunals of some of these fucking "journalists".

There's no fucking way that this is just accidentally sloppy. It's fucking calculated and purposeful.

I'll defer the hangings and firing squads, but some of these propagandist disguised as "reporters" need to spend the rest of their miserable lives reporting on obituaries in some Dumbfuckistan Murika shithole.

[Grokenstein]

18. Between "rational, sane and calm" and "chaotic clown circus HONK HONK SCREEECH BAM,"

the media knows which one grabs the most rubes' eyeballs.

[barbtries]

19. there's not much that pisses me off

more than this both sides bullshit. just tell the fucking TRUTH. that's the job of the media. i'm actually shocked that the AP did this. i know, i shouldn't be. but i am.

[dlk]

21. It's fact versus fiction- alternative facts don't exist

Bothsiderism is toxic and has done severe damage to our democracy.

[ancianita]

22. Ironically, the AP had a special arrangement with Nazis and Hitler back in the day.

AP's "both sides" work is pretty old. Since before most of us were born. When such work came to light in recent years, they released an internal memo that admitted to their deal with Hitler and the Nazis.

They deny having made any "trading with the enemy" shady deal, but both WaPo and NYT have reported on them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/05/10/the-secret-deal-the-associated-press-made-with-the-nazis-during-wwii/

I've always read the AP as a right wing reporting organization, and so none of this "we report, you decide" crap from them surprises me.

[LiberalArkie]

23. Trump is correct with his info when the only people he knows are in the top 1%

[Mersky]

24. Rotten awful take by the AP

Should be labeled as opinion or choose-your-own adventure fiction.

There’s so many ways to report that straight, and yet, they went with that?

[ancianita]

25. More from NYT on the AP and the Nazis.

In March 2016, a German historian, Harriet Scharnberg, argued that The Associated Press was complicit in allowing the Nazis to “portray a war of extermination as a conventional war.” Her research prompted the review, which was written by Larry Heinzerling, an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a former editor at the agency.

While the Nazi regime cracked down on the local and international press in 1933, The Associated Press was able to report in Germany until the United States entered the war in late 1941....

In 1935, the news organization complied with a Nazi edict by firing or reassigning six employees the Germans considered to be Jewish, the review said. It made the “difficult decision” because it believed “it was critical for A.P. to remain in Germany and gather news and photos during this crucial period,” the agency said in a statement.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/business/media/associated-press-nazi-germany.html

All those great photos of Hitler and other German events were brought to us by the AP, free of violence carried on against the Jews. Sure, the AP defends its photo exchanges as necessary, though they were censored, but enough right wing Germans worked for AP to make its defense about "objectivity" a bit disingenuous.

[SergeStorms]

26. Republicans deep-sixed the fairness doctrine....

but they want news organizations to present their fictitious representation of the news (a.k.a. "alternative facts" ) as an honest portrayal of the news. Fuck them. They have FAUX NOISE and (holds breath) OAN as the presidential propaganda Wurlitzer, isn't that enough for them?

UPI, AP, Bloomberg etc. should report the news as it is, not fictitious talking points that supposedly offer a "fair" balance of the news. That's not their job. They seem to forget that.

[certainot]

27. and RW radio, father of faux. maybe AP management listen to limbaugh

[betsuni]

28. I saw too much both sides negativity on the news yesterday and then again this morning.

Including that both sides are politicizing a virus vaccine.

I'm getting the feeling they'll pretend Kamala Harris doesn't really exist so they can keep up the not-enough-enthusiasm-centrist-I-just-don't-like-Biden-both-sides thing. I saw young men on different programs saying Biden choosing Harris was pandering and they wouldn't vote for Trump but didn't like Biden. Here we go again, but at least there's no third party threat.

[hay rick]

29. There is no "reasonable midpoint" between...

...a moderate Democrat and the rabid libertarian/authoritarian mainstream of the party of Trump.

[niyad]

31. Absolutely disgusted KNR

[GETPLANING]

32. Our Commercial Media

will carry Trump all the way to the finish line - again - just to keep people on the edge of their seats.
I said "our commercial media," didn't I? Except it isn't ours, is it. It belongs to the shareholders. We aren't even the customers. The advertisers are the customers. We are just the target market.

[ecstatic]

35. They're leading themselves to their own slaughter

If tRump steals another election, don't think for a second there won't be dozens more Khashoggis--only this time, it'll be happening on US soil.

And guess what? Not a damn thing will be done about it! Just more gaslighting, lies, and faux concern from barr and the GOP.

I wonder if they'll continue "both sides"ing the issue when it's their reporters being poisoned/killed?

[vercetti2021]

37. Fuck AP

They stopped being good reporting a long time ago.

[BigmanPigman]

38. 2016 Redux.

No one has learned anything...The media is still ruled by $$$/ratings, Fakebook is still allowing BS to be viewed by millions for $$$ and Americans are still stupid enough to buy it all over again.

[Grasswire2]

39. AP's WH correspondent Jonathan Lemire is a fine, honest and courageous reporter.

It was Lemire who stood in front of Putin and Trump in Helsinki and got Trump on the record regarding the election meddling.

Lemire told us later that Putin was staring him down when he asked those two questions.

He was courageous in that moment, in the finest tradition of a free press.

I'm never going to knock him. I've never seen him flinch.

[Roy Rolling]

40. "Colossal Failure"?

Puhleeze.

I read the entire article and it was good journalism. Readers can figure it out for themselves, they understand Trump’s version of reality is bullshit compared to Biden’s version.

I don’t need or want a headline that screams “Trump is a Moron Compared to Biden”, no matter how much overwhelming evidence there is.

There’s a difference between journalism and opinion.

This is an opinion piece slamming an AP reporter’s story, written by a competing reporter. Consider the source.

[babylonsister]

43. Boehlert reports on the media; he's not a competing reporter.

AP is supposed to report the news without bias. He's pointing out they're not. I'm glad someone is.

[dajoki]

44. It's not only the AP...

there's way too much of the bothsiderism going on in all the so called MSM.

[dajoki]

45. It's not only the AP...

there's way too much of the bothsiderism going on in all the so called MSM.

[seta1950]

49. Yes

The media overall has failed us , except a few like Rachel Maddow, the give their opinion as opposed to giving us the news as it is.

[dchill]

50. Reality is NOT a version.