Fact Checking The Associated Press

-by Noah

Last week, I took a sarcastic look at the righty bias of the AP as expressed in their whining about what President Obama even wore on his feet. The empty-headedness of that particular article lent itself to a bit of snide humor to make a point; not this one.
 
Regular DWT readers know that I am not a big fan of President Obama, but I am a fan of fairness. Did the President’s speech satisfy me? Not really. It was little more than a campaign speech, right down to the lengthy god stuff at the end. But that’s not what this post is about. Others can, have, and will take that angle. His speech wasn’t even aimed at people like me. I’m just writing about one particular example of the AP’s righty propagandizing.

In this day of local media outlets all over the country downsizing and lazily relying, more and more, on just printing or broadcasting syndicated readymade outsourced news copy that is fed to them like pabulum, this Associated Press article is a good example of how a conservative news corporation spreads its righty talking points to the masses. It is agenda-mongering packaged news and, it is gobbled up by an easily fooled, unquestioning public: not unlike a politician’s speech. There was a time when there was a lot more news writing available than just what the AP had to offer, even diversified points of view, but not so much any more. If you look at any small city paper or watch the local stations, chances are really good that you’ll only get AP’s righty point of view.
 
Here’s what got served up by the AP, via my Roadrunner account, the morning after President Obama’s Oval Office address to the nation about the underwater oil gusher crisis. First, the frontpage header:

“Fact Checking Obama’s Speech-President Addresses Gulf Disaster But Does Lofty Rhetoric Meet Reality?”

       
So, right away we have a headline that implies that President Obama lied or is somehow out to lunch. When the readers clicked on the link to the article by a writer going by the name of Calvin Woodward, they found an interior headline that read:
 
          “FACT CHECK: Obama left blanks in oil speech”
 
I would not have been surprised if Woodward had substituted “oily speech” or “slippery speech” for ‘oil speech.’ Yeah, we all know Obama left out a lot of detail, maybe out of a desire for brevity or the simple desire to just make a statement that he was “working on it” and that he was about to confront BP head on in the oval office, on his own turf and terms, as it were. By his own standards, it wasn’t much of a speech. Compared to what we got in the way of Oval Office talks from his predecessor, though, at least we can say it wasn’t gibberish, if not the Gettysburg Address, which, by the way, was deemed by many at the time, including Honest Abe himself, to be a failure. But why does the AP imply that President Obama got his facts wrong or is lying to the public? Why use the words ‘fact check’? How about we FACT CHECK the AP’s Woodward instead? Straightaway in his first paragraph of propagandizing, Woodward says:

“In assuring Americans that BP won’t control the compensation fund for Gulf oil spill recovery, President Barack Obama failed to mention that the Government won’t control it, either.”

Two things in that quote from Woodward leap out at me. One, he has skillfully used the Republican tactic of associating the word ‘fail’ or a variation of it with the man they can’t stand seeing in the White House. Two, Woodward lies. The President did mention it and it appears in the very portion of the speech that Woodward quotes further down in his article:

“Tomorrow, I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s recklessness. And this fund will not be controlled by BP. In order to ensure that all legitimate claims are paid out in a fair and timely manner, the account must and will be administered by an independent, third party.”

Right there, President Obama has indeed mentioned that an independent third party, not the government (or BP), will control the fund. Yo, Calvin, Sometimes the Gotcha moments go the other way.
 
Woodward goes on to point out that “an independent arbiter is no more bound to the government’s wishes than an oil company’s” and points out that there is much uncertainty remaining about the process. True enough. Woodward then makes a comparison that all of us are worried about-- the Exxon Valdez case, and how Exxon managed to have their lawyers outlast many of their victims.
 
Next Woodward brings up the issue of the construction of new barrier islands off of Louisiana that would, hopefully, block the oil from reaching shore. He bitches about how long the decision for approval took. Only at the end, in a separate paragraph, does he imply that there might have been a reason for the delay. Really, to objective readers, it’s a perfectly good one: There might have been a possibility that the new barriers might only shift the oil to someone else’s shores by altering currents.  Imagine the field day someone like Woodward would have had if the Army Corps of Engineers had rushed into an ill-advised plan that failed to meet its intentions or made something even worse. One might be tempted to ask, “Isn’t that how we got into this mess in the first place?”
 
Woodward does also manage to get something right at the end of his “report." He points out the caginess of Obama’s repeated declaration that he has called a “moratorium on deepwater drilling." The fact is, as we all already know, that the moratorium is only for new permits and that the deep water drilling in the Gulf is continuing.
 
Bottom Line: The President of the United States is appointing the same guy who administers the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, Kenneth Feinberg, to oversee the compensation of BP’s victims, and, is shaking down BP for $20 BILLION to pay for it, just for starters. I’d still like to see BP’s heads on sticks, but coughing up that kind of money is a start. That’s twice what Congress was asking for and could not get due to Repug recalcitrance, and, certainly a hell of a lot more than the $75 MILLION cap that current law would hold BP liable for. THAT’S the real story, and, it’s the story that the Associated Press chose not to tell America on Wednesday morning, choosing instead to attempt to discredit the one person that can actually do anything to help BP’s victims. A few years ago, AP’s idea of a President met a crisis with a “Mission Accomplished” banner.
 
I will now wait for a stirring AP report that thoroughly fact checks FOX NEWS. I will wait, and wait, and wait, and wait…