Seriously, this video is pretty much the ideal response to the whole thing. McCain’s campaign ought to be embarrassed, and the rest of us can laugh at both his campaign and Paris’s response.
(of course it is Paris Hilton, and she gets the details of the energy policy wrong… drilling wouldn’t carry us over because it would take 5-10 years before any of that oil actually entered the market)
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It feels like there’s a shift in AP copy. Perhaps it’s not just my imagination.
Why is the AP doing analysis pieces anyway? This is a disturbing development — their content gets syndicated far and wide. The AP “opinion” will get distributed far and wide — if they’re in the tank for McCain, I don’t see how Obama’s campaign overcomes that:
Yesterday we flagged the AP’s Jennifer Loven’s ‘analysis’ piece flogging the McCain/RNC spin on Obama’s run to the center. Well, as every crack communication operation knows, message repetition is the key to success. And so today we have another ‘analysis’ piece, this time by the AP’s Steven Hurst. And it’s practically the same piece. Hurst and Loven actually both use the identical quote from RNC spinmeister Alex Conant.
Says Conant: “”There appears to be no issue that Barack Obama is not willing to reverse himself on for the sake of political expedience.”
The identical quote appears in both pieces. If the pieces weren’t bylined I think I might have assumed one was a rewrite of the other. But they actually appear to be two completely original articles, just mouthing the identical McCain/RNC line.
TPM reacting to CNN.com posting a poll asking whether Obama has “enough patriotism” to be President, a ridiculous push-poll style question if there ever was one:
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Ben Smith, at The Politico, flags that today CNN’s running a ‘online poll’ asking if Barack Obama has enough patriotism to be president. As Ben, with some understatement, put it’s “it’s odd to see the mainstream media drive a largely whispered question that none of his main, named critics — Hillary, McCain, or the RNC — will touch.” Yeah, I’d say so.
That’s how it works. Starts at right-swing smear sites and hoax emails. Then the AP’s Nedra Pickler, who specializes in scooping up this slop and laundering it into the mainstream press, writes it up for the AP that runs across the country. And then picks it up and makes it a regular part of the campaign conversation.
I doubt some top exec at CNN came up with this or any name anchor. It’s some producer in the bowels of the operation. But it amounts to the same thing because it’s part of the culture and there’s no accountability.
Get ready for more.
No, I’d rather not get ready for more. I’d rather do something to fix this, because I’m tired of seeing Nedra Pickler and CNN complete the Matt Drudge cycle. Their job is to vet information and present their opinion to us. Not to repeat anonymous smear emails they see on the Internet.
It’s ridiculous. How can we beat this kind of garbage?
That’s a good roundup. And, seriously, what was Nedra Pickler thinking going to Roger Stone for an opinion on the Democratic candidate. He’s a well-known “dirty-trickster” for the Republican party, the man behind the anti-Hillary 527 named so that the initials spell “C.U.N.T.” Yes, really. WTF, AP? Is that guys opinion going to shed any light on anything? Why does this woman, who did similar Republican hit pieces at AP during the ‘04 campaign, still have a job?
Oh my god, please make AP stop. I wonder how much VC I would need to take on the AP and their crappy, crappy reporting. Whatever their standards were in the past, they truly suck these days. A lot of bad reporting and the “conventional wisdom” that gets generated happen because of poor fact checking and reporting from the AP. It’s time that we demanded better. I just don’t know how to make that happen.
Instead of looking at conspiracies at the Times and Fox News, maybe we should focus on the apparent laziness at the AP. I swear most of their stories seem lifted directly from press releases. I used to think it was just their political reporting that would skew to whatever direction their interviewee leaned, but man, this article about Apple’s new OS is, well, fawning. And fawning in a “I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but this is what they told me” kind of way. I don’t think Apple’s marketing department could’ve written the thing better.
Then again, in a world where we have fun things like video news releases (VNRs) produced by CNN, the “Most Trusted Name in News,” maybe I shouldn’t be so glib about the quality of the AP.
Also, I’m not saying that stories can’t be glowingly positive without seeming hackish. It’s the glowingly positive and over-the-top expectations of things like Spotlight that cross the line into hackishness. For example, Spotlight, cool as it is, has costs (e.g. disk, cpu). Also, Apple likes to claim “200 new features” when many of them are, well, not very noteworthy. I don’t think we count new toolbar buttons as a new feature when evaluating, say, Microsoft Office.
Not that I’m poo-pooing Spotlight or Tiger, but I’m just not so excited about articles like this…
