My letter (now an open letter) to Kathleen Carroll at the AP:
Kathleen Carroll
Associated Press
Ms. Carroll,
I know you're getting a lot of emails about Ron Fournier today. From his "Keep up the fight." email to Karl Rove to his job interview with the McCain campaign to his recent column on Biden as Obama's VP pick, Fournier is taking a lot of heat.
I'm not writing to tell you to fire Fournier or take him off the presidential beat. You can employ whoever you want. You can hire Karl Rove himself to cover the Obama campaign. It's your choice.
I used to think of AP as the objective news agency par excellence. Over the last few years I've seen more and more reporting that has made me question that. Now, I can no longer see AP that way. You have a clear bias. You're not Fox News yet, but you're pretty far down that path. A good reputation, once lost, takes years and years to get back if you can ever get it back at all.
Disappointed,
David Conrad
Detroit, MI
(Note: the links above were links in the email, too.)
What do you think? I wanted to be polite but firm, not rant.
What can you do?
Contact Kathleen Carroll (Fournier's boss) at kcarroll@ap.org, and cc these two:
Michael Oreskes, AP Managing Editor, mOreskes@ap.org
Ron Fournier, AP reporter and Washington D.C. Bureau Chief, rfournier@ap.org
Let 'em know what you think!
Update:
gougef points out that Firedoglake has a handy tool that makes it easy to write an LTE on this subject: Remove Fournier
(Thanks, gougef!)
Also, don't miss dday's excellent diary on this.