AP is notorious for refusing to give appropriate credit to blogs that break stories. They’ve done so again in their coverage today of Barack Obama’s letter calling for the firing of DoJ Voting Rights section chief John Tanner in the wake of our video coverage of his recent objectionable comments [emphasis ours]:
Setting aside the de rigueur BRAD BLOG slight, AP received a response to Obama’s call for Tanner’s head from DoJ spokesman Erik Ablin:
“Grossly misconstrued”? AP does not detail in what way Ablin believes the comments to have been “grossly misconstrued,” but quotes him as saying the department “continues to have full confidence” in Tanner.
Former colleagues of Tanner’s, however, don’t seem to agree that the comments were misconstrued…
Tanner’s predecessor as Voting Section chief, Joe Rich, a forty-year veteran of the DoJ, responded to the remarks by saying, “In trying to defend his decision [to overrule career staffers] in the Georgia [Photo ID] case, he’s saying things that are frankly ludicrous.”
Toby Moore, an analyst at the Civil Rights Division who worked with Tanner until early 2006, said the comments were “false,” adding, “This is the kind of analysis that the voting section has been doing: seat of the pants generalizations and suppositions instead of hard numbers and analysis.”
He went on to say that Tanner’s findings on these matters were “always in support of what his Republican appointee bosses wanted him to say, which is why he got to where he is.”
The AP goes on in their coverage to largely miss the point of the entire brouhaha by pointing to “well documented” National Center for Health Statistics numbers on shorter life expectancies of “particularly male blacks,” and graciously notes: “But blacks do live to become senior citizens.”
Aside from the utter distraction of that particular issue, it should be noted, as PortlyDyke did shortly after the comments were first reported here, his comments referred to “minorities” as opposed to strictly African-Americans. When factoring in the longer life spans of Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native American women (the voting rights of whom the DoJ Civil Rights Division is also tasked with protecting), minorities actually live longer than Caucasians.
All of which, as we mentioned, is rather beside the overall obnoxious and incorrect points of Tanner’s comments…Even if Tanner, as TPM Muckracker pointed out today, will have to explain his comments soon in a House Judiciary Commitee hearing to the elderly, not dead first, 78-year-old minority chairman, Rep. John Conyers.
May I suggest a slight edit to this paragraph?
“The AP goes on in their coverage to COMPLETELY
largelymiss the point of the entire brouhaha by pointing to “well documented” National Center for Health Statistics numbers on shorter life expectancies of “particularly male blacks”, and graciously notes: “But blacks do live to become senior citizens.”Brad, give those AP reporters a little slack, will ya? It’s tough sitting around all day long, day after day, waiting to see what everyone else is going to write about. Not only are they a day late and a dollar short on stories, but it would be HUMILIATING for them to have to admit that they didn’t actually get the story themselves, that they got it off a yuckee blog!!!
Also, it makes it kinda hard to discredit blogs when you’re ripping them off.
“Minorities liver langer and childrens do lurn” may be the banner to replace “Mission Accomplished”?
What’s an AP?
: )
#4 Teritlooze,
In case you were not joking. (I am sure this response will be amusing to some of you. Just remember I might not be clear on everything, but I am absolutely serious about my opinion.)
AP (in the context of this article) is an acronym which stands for Associated Press.
Their published values are located here.
Although they claim to be an organization. (note the .ORG in their domain http://www.ap.org) I have never quite understood when or where their photos could be used. Their website has terms and conditions which seem to me like they just copyright everything they do. Which at least in my opinion seems to go against the ability to get their story out.
(for example: I personally have a show on public access television a National Cable Television Association (NCTA) member) when you look at the rules and stuff, gives us access to ASCAP and BMI with no prior agreement, but I never saw anything in there about the AP, so when I see AP Photo, I always stay away from it. I never use their stuff. But if you look closely at the AP’s Archive web page You’ll see…
“With over 500,000 breaking news stories gathered from the daily international output of AP Television News, plus a formidable alliance of content partners:
ABC America Sky News
Watch the AP Archive showreel.
Low bandwith, High bandwith
ABC Australia Sports News TV
Calyx TV TechTV
CCTV 20th Century Archive
CTV Canada Universal Newsreel
ITV Thailand UN and UN Agencies
KRT North Korea Vatican TV
RTR Russia WWF Archive”
Clearly they are attached to the hip to at least ABC, which when you add that to all the “for profit information” links on their websites:
Buy AP News | Buy AP Photos | Buy AP Video | Buy AP Audio | Buy AP Books | Careers | Shop AP Essentials
It makes me question how they are actually non profit. And if they are not non-profit how they can actually have unbiased news as per their “Mission Statement thingy”
Anyway, I don’t really care because they apparently seem to be better off than I am. While you can see they have everything for sale, including their news, my show actually COSTS ME money (that’s a negative cash flow) and then I give it away freely. And it ain’t like I am out there grinding the pavement in war torn countries trying to get photos for the corporate media to spin in the favor of the corrupt Bush administrations goals.
On the other hand we have the WIKI definition of AP:
“The Associated Press, or AP, is an American news agency, and is the world’s largest such organization. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, who both contribute stories to it and use material written by its staffers. Many newspapers and broadcasters outside the United States are AP subscribers — that is, they pay a fee to use AP material but are not members of the cooperative.”
In my opinion they have some of the best photos and crazy ass shots I ever seen, I wouldn’t want to be standing where some of their photos were taken from, but on the other hand to what agenda does this get content get used to brainwash the American People?
As I already said, I don’t use their copyrighted photos, (unless someone tricks me, by republishing something they stole, and made it look like it was theirs) and by writing this response to you about what is the AP and learning more than I care to learn about them, I don’t think I WANT to be friends with them, as I don’t see that it’s clear they have “We The People of The United States of America’s” best interest at hand.
And another thing I don’t understand, why do they publish their photos on the web if they claim so much copyright? Seems to me they’d want to keep that crap locked up in a vault somewhere.
This is some of the weird crap I do not understand about Corporate media. A cooperative to me seems like a good idea, but with the behavior and blackout censorship and propaganda that the corporate media is currently pumping and dumping, I fail to see how this is in the public’s interest.
that’s my final thought.
And out of context of this thread, actually there is also a band out there called the “A.P. Collective.”