The Truthiness of AP

Two of my biggest gripes about AP have been their strident editorialism masking as "news," and their apparent disregard for facts when the facts go contrary to the reporter's agenda.

Today's example is this cheer-leading propaganda piece article for the World Wildlife Federation about the environment. The first three paras slide in just under the "fair use" limits. I've bolded a few bits:

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - When it comes to squandering the earth's natural resources, residents of this desert land of chilled swimming pools, monster 4x4s and air-conditioned malls are on a par with even the ravenous consumption of Americans, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

The average person in the Emirates puts more demand on the global ecosystem than any other, giving the country the world's largest per-capita "ecological footprint," WWF data shows. The United States runs second.

But the oil-rich Emirates is considered a developing country, and even as a signatory to the United Nations' Kyoto protocol on global warming, is not required to cut emissions. The United States is no longer bound by Kyoto, which the Bush administration rejected after taking office in 2001.

For the record, the United States has NEVER been "bound by Kyoto." The Bush administration no more "rejected" Kyoto than the previous administration did--it was the United States Senate, which holds the sole power of treaty ratification, that soundly and unanimously rejected the Kyoto protocol in 1997 even before Al Gore symbolically signed it a year later, a wee bit before the current administration took office. Neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration submitted the Protocol to the Senate in the face of the Senate's unanimous pre-emptive "rejection."

This is naked issue advocacy disguised as "news." It relies on a politically-interpreted non-peer-reviewed meta-report from a special interest group as the major "data" source. It contains some gross factual inaccuracies.

But don't hold your breath waiting on AP to live up to their own standards and correct the errors of fact, or label editorialism as such. They've already indicated those standards they proclaim are just for show.

[Cross-posted to Rathergate.com.]