We've all complained from time to time about inaccuracy, partisanship and just plain bad writing in AP articles over the last year or so.
Now, in the last few months, it seems the AP has hired a bunch of incompetent hacks. Where I would typically find only maybe one questionable comma in a story, I now typically find flagrant AP mistakes (Peanut Corp. of America, for example, or five percent).
Those mistakes are pretty easy to fix. But this ... this is just inexcusable:
BAGHDAD — Iraq's prime minister appealed Friday for foreign expertise to develop his country's oil industry, which has suffered from decades of war, negligence and insurgent attacks.
[...]
The industrial and agricultural sectors suffered under Saddam Hussein's regime and the insurgency that followed its collapse.
(bolding mine)
Right. It just up and collapsed. No outside forces, natch. Just one of those things.
The story does eventually mention what led to the collapse of the Hussein regime:
The country, which sits on the world's third-largest oil reserves with at least 115 billion barrels, was producing more than 3 million barrels per day before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
Fourth paragraph from the bottom of an article about the fact that Iraq's oil production is hurting, and the specifics of one of the key factors cited in that production's demise are not mentioned until the last third of the article.
Now, is the invasion pretty common knowledge? To people who would read past the headline, probably. Thus it's not news so much as a reminder.
But the fact that Barack Obama is president is not news so much as a reminder, yet anything that mentions Obama mentions pretty early the fact that he is president.
The recession is not news, but any economy story mentions it pretty early.
The bailout is not news, but any story on a bank or the auto industry mentions it pretty early.
So why would a story about Iraq and oil not mention, when discussing Saddam Hussein's fall from power, what specifically caused him to fall from power?
And particularly, why would this happen in a story about Iraq and oil by someone who just yesterday wrote:
Iraq signed a joint venture oil deal with a British-based company on Thursday in one of the largest deals since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, an official said.
That's the writer's LEDE. So what happened?
And from the same writer a day ago:
The talks came as Kuwait celebrated the 18th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion that drove out Saddam's forces and left American warplanes patrolling parts of Iraqi airspace for more than a decade.
Second sentence. (The nominalization there in the first sentence is shitty writing, and typical of what I've come to expect from the AP.)
Now, I'm hoping this will be a one-time thing. Maybe the writer has worked too much with Ron Fournier or Charles Babington, and this was a brain fart. Maybe the bureau's editor was out sick or something.
But to bury the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the bottom third of the story, thus decreasing the odds it will appear early enough in the story to appear on the page in a newspaper (we almost never run all of any wire story), ... smells bad.