Dan

Calabrese

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July 23, 2009

First the Economy, Then Terror, Now Palin: The Associated Press Lies

Let’s just establish this right off the bat: The Associated Press lies. Not in every news story, necessarily, but when it wants to slant a story to serve its ideological bias, the AP has no compunction about flat-out lying.

Case in point: If you read any AP story about the economy, you will inevitably read that the current U.S. recession started in December 2007. This is a lie. It is not only false, but very easily demonstrated as such. A recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, which measures the nation’s gross domestic product.

So if we have been in recession since December 2007, that would have to mean the economy has been in a negative growth mode since then. It hasn’t. Here are the numbers for the first three quarters of 2008:

First quarter GDP: $14.15 trillion.

Second quarter GDP: $14.29 trillion.

Third quarter GDP: $14.41 trillion.

GDP declined to $14.20 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2008, and again to $14.09 trillion in the first quarter of 2009, so that’s when the recession started – not a year earlier as the AP continually claims.

Why does the AP constantly make this false claim? In order to lay the blame for the recession at the feet of George W. Bush, of course. But the facts demonstrate that the economy was growing throughout most of 2008, and that the AP is a bunch of liars.

Now, there are bald-faced lies and there are lies of emphasis. That brings us to the latest AP story about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

An AP headline screams: “AP NewsBreak: Palin implicated in ethics probe”.

Oh my God! That sounds serious! And if you’re the AP, it’s a long-awaited reason for hope after the previous 19 ethics complaints against Palin were all summarily dismissed as frivolous and completely without merit. The shocking lead tells us:

An independent investigator has found evidence that Gov. Sarah Palin may have violated ethics laws by trading on her position in seeking money for legal fees . . .

Oh dear! What troubling words and phrases! An “independent investigator.” She “violated ethics laws.” She was “trading on her position.” She was “seeking money.”

Too bad it’s all complete nonsense. Too bad the actual “independent investigator” didn’t blame Palin at all for her situation, and instead blamed the State of Alaska for having such a ridiculous ethics process that a governor can face more than $500,000 in legal fees for bogus complaints, and isn’t supposed to raise money to help her pay the bills.

In fact, the only thing Palin was apparently “guilty” of was using the word “official” to describe the legal defense fund set up for her benefit. Using that word, the investigator said, implied that the fund was sanctioned by the state for her use as governor.

Of course, the word wasn’t intended to mean that at all. It was merely intended to let potential donors know that this fund is actually endorsed by Sarah Palin, and that if they give money to it, she will benefit as they intend.

That’s your big ethics violation. Whoopee. An umpire who expands the strike zone in the ninth inning of a 15-0 game is more unethical than that.

But you wouldn’t know it from reading the AP. They want so desperately for Palin to be guilty of something, they can’t stop themselves from running scandal-mongering headlines, even when there is no scandal. Of course, they did the same thing just last week with the big, super-secret CIA plot that turned out to be nothing more than a PowerPoint presentation about how to maybe kill Osama Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders.

The “story” was a big bunch of nothing, but because Dick Cheney was involved, the AP trotted out the scandal headlines.

The bottom line is that the AP is nothing more than a propaganda service for its own political biases. It lies. You can’t trust anything the AP says, especially when they run one of their “analysis” or “AP Impact” pieces, and especially when they run a story full of conjecture from anonymous sources. (Oh wait. That’s practically every AP story!)

But generally speaking, if the story carries an AP dateline, you will never go wrong refusing to believe a word of it.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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