The AP posted a story two hours ago that is now on Yahoo front page and I'm sure many other news portals.  

It's titled "Anti-abortion senator to speak to Democrats" and is written by Kimberly Hefling of the AP.  

I spend about eight hours or more a day working on my web site, so I am usually surfing the web for hours a day. The AP, which I still foolishly read on Yahoo, has more bullshit memes running about Obama than can imaginably or arguably be be coincidental. This happens to be one of the most egregious headlines I have seen in a while.

It's hard to believe, but the case against Ivins, as far as being the "Anthrax Killer" just keeps getting worse.  And more embarrassing to the FBI.

Now it turns out that the FBI was offering Big Bucks, millions of dollars, for people to turn on Ivins and report incriminating stories about him.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Before killing himself last week, Army scientist Bruce Ivins told friends that government agents had stalked him and his family for months, offered his son $2.5 million to rat him out and tried to turn his hospitalized daughter against him with photographs of dead anthrax victims.

It gets worse ....

A couple of days back I did an "I’m concerned" diary about an AP story that showed that the negative/character assassination stuff might be paying off for John McCain in the polling. As is all too common when I write a diary on "some bad news for our side," I got a few comments hinting that I might be a "concern troll." (Which I’m not; if you look at what I’ve written here over the past year or so and look at my other blogs, you’ll probably conclude the truth: I’m a liberal who occasionally, not often, writes about the bad news for our side, or some problem I see on our side.)
(continued)

I know there's a thread going, but it's got over 500 comments and my computer can't even handle that many, and I'm sure others' can't as well.

I just have to share this:  This bizarre case is getting even MORE bizarre as the government displays more and more desperation in trying to make their case.  

Get a load of this headline from the AP:

Sorority may link anthrax suspect to NJ letters

Sounds promising, no?  A lonely scientist obsessed with sorority girls?  Right?  

Wrong.  This is such a desperately smelly red herring tossed our way once again all I can think of is "they must think we're really stupid".  

In the recent statement by Obama about offshore drilling, there has apparently been selective editing taking place at the AP to delete this paragraph.

Here's an earlier release which contains the whole Obama quote.

http://ap.google.com/...

Later versions of this AP piece leave out this paragraph, and 'news outlets' like the NYT are not quoting this paragraph.  

"Like all compromises, it also includes steps that I haven't always supported," Obama conceded. "I remain skeptical that new offshore drilling will bring down gas prices in the short-term or significantly reduce our oil dependence in the long-term, though I do welcome the establishment of a process that will allow us to make future drilling decisions based on science and fact."

After it was revealed that there was an undisclosed relationship between the Associated Press Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier, Karl Rove and John McCain’s campaign, and the documented bias shown by the AP since Fournier took over, you would think they would at least make an effort to put out an unbiased story. You would be wrong.

Yesterday Associated Press writer Charles Babington wrote what was ostensibly an article critical of John McCain, but in reality Babington bent over backwards to minimize and explain away McCain’s problem with “details.”

At times McCain can appear to be short on details. In some instances, he has made misstatements or eyebrow-raising comments during the long days of campaigning in front of cameras and microphones. Sympathetic listeners call them understandable slips of the tongue and question whether any candidate can know everything. Opponents call them gaffes, or worse.

Babington follows with a statement from McCain’s spokesman and the news that there are websites dedicated to making lists of Obama’s misstatements before getting back to the point of the article.

Some of McCain's remarks seem to stem from his generally breezy nature and occasional tendency to leave details to subordinates.

I’ll skip Babington’s six paragraphs about McCain’s position on an affirmative action referendum in Arizona and go right to McCain’s breezy take on Viagra versus birth-control pills.

"I don't know what I ..." McCain said. He rubbed his face while looking thoughtful. "I'll look at my voting record on it. But I have — I don't recall the vote right now. But I'll be glad to look at it."

McCain was looking thoughtful? You be the judge. At this point a journalist might mention what McCain's voting record on the issue is, but apparently Babington has a breezy nature too. Instead he does a packed little paragraph of other details McCain has been short on, mentioning his Czechoslovakia gaffes, and:

He also implied that the so-called "Sunni Awakening" in Iraq occurred after President Bush announced plans in 2006 for a surge in U.S. troops, when in fact it began several months before.

Now I'll give McCain a pass on his Czechoslovakia problem...after all, he spent the first 57 years of his life calling it that, but I won't give Babington a pass on that dismissive, revisionist description of McCain's mistake about the timing of the Anbar Awakening and the surge. McCain didn't imly that the Anbar Awakening happened after George Bush announced the surge in 2007 (not 2006...details, Charles, details), he said it:

Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history.

And when McCain was called on it? He defended his remarks and to this day maintains that he wasn't wrong. And of course Babington forgets to mention the three separate occassions where McCain showed that he either forgot, didn't know, or lied about Iran, Shiites and Sunnis. Those are two examples where McCain has shown an appalling lack of understanding about fundamental elements of the war that he claims to be an expert on, yet Babington ignores one, downplays the other and tells us that John McCain has a breezy nature.

Babington finishes with thoughts from a professor at George Washington University, who is "amazed" that politicians don't misspeak more often and warns that Democrats need to be careful about making McCain's age an issue. And while it's tempting to mock that concern for Democrats, I'll instead point out that Babington dug up a speechwriter for EISENHOWER to warn the Democrats not to make an issue of McCain's age. It's the only funny thing about this article.  

On Tuesday Michael Calderone at Politico produced definitive evidence of Ron Fournier's bias in favor of John McCain. He did it by linking the Associated Press Washington Bureau chief directly to the McCain presidential campaign. Over a period of several months during 2006, Fournier discussed taking a high-level communications job with the McCain campaign. Apparently Fournier turned down the job offer in the end.

I say 'apparently' because often it is difficult to tell from the reporting produced by Fournier and his Bureau whether or not he views himself as a campaign operative.

The most striking thing about this story is what is absent. Although he oversees reporting on the presidential race for the purportedly unbiased and nonpartisan AP, Fournier has never disclosed to the public his close contacts with the McCain campaign. And though he doesn't deny the contacts, when asked about them Fournier declined to discuss the matter and referred Politico to an AP spokesman (who issued a bland statement). If Fournier has had nothing to hide, then why the secrecy and evasiveness? Who would argue that the public does not have a right to know that the AP Washington Bureau chief considered working for a presidential candidate?

Here are details from Politico:

In October 2006, the McCain team approached Fournier about joining the fledgling operation, according to a source with knowledge of the talks. In the months that followed, said a source, Fournier spoke about the job possibility with members of McCain’s inner circle, including political aides Mark Salter, John Weaver and Rick Davis.

Salter, who remains a top McCain adviser, said in an e-mail to Politico that Fournier was considered for "a senior advisory role" in communications.

"He did us the courtesy of considering the offer before politely declining it," Salter said.

Discussions with McCain's top aides lasting months don't constitute a mere 'courtesy' no matter how Salter tries to spin it. If Fournier had not been interested, he would have rejected McCain's advances at the outset.

After entertaining this job offer, Fournier should not have been covering the presidential campaign, certainly not while keeping his contacts with McCain secret. That's not a hard call, ethically.

This is just the latest in a series of controversies surrounding Fournier, from his unseemly attention to John McCain's donut-gustation at an interview, to his eager embrace of Republican talking points, to the extraordinary changes he introduced at AP encouraging the freer expression of opinion in news stories. His predecessor at the AP Washington Bureau, Sandy Johnson, sees Fournier's policies as a threat to it.

"I just hope he doesn’t destroy it."

Fournier's ties to the Republican establishment were exposed garishly earlier this month by a House Oversight and Government Reform report. Discussing the Bush administration's political response to Pat Tillman's death in 2004, it cited emails sent to the WH offering political advice. This exchange stood out.

Karl Rove exchanged e-mails about Pat Tillman with Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier, under the subject line "H-E-R-O." In response to Mr. Fournier's e-mail, Mr. Rove asked, "How does our country continue to produce men and women like this," to which Mr. Fournier replied, "The Lord creates men and women like this all over the world. But only the great and free countries allow them to flourish. Keep up the fight."

Fournier tried to explain away his seemingly cozy relationship with Karl Rove.

"I was an AP political reporter at the time of the 2004 e-mail exchange, and was interacting with a source, a top aide to the president, in the course of following an important and compelling story. I regret the breezy nature of the correspondence."

However he convinced almost none of his critics that his Rovian correspondence was appropriate. For one thing, Fournier has never written about Tillman. So what was the need to contact Rove in the first place? The episode gives the impression that Fournier was just worshipping at Rove's altar.

Even before that email correspondence came to light (almost accidentally), Fournier had long been notorious both for carrying water for John McCain in particular, and for savaging McCain's rivals. Among other things, under Fournier's leadership AP reporting this year has consistently downplayed or suppressed information about McCain's many contradictory, false, and otherwise embarrassing statements. Last week at Media Matters Eric Boehlert surveyed Fournier's long and tawdry record of partisanship:

In two "Analysis" pieces and a column, Fournier questioned whether John Edwards was a "phony," announced the Clintons suffered from "utter self-absorption," and claimed that Barack Obama was "bordering on arrogance." That's the right of a pundit. But at the same time, Fournier avoided raising any doubts about Sen. John McCain, and in fact rushed to his aid in print during the senator's time of campaign need.

That ethos seems to have been adopted by the larger AP political team, which, honestly, writes as if it's completely in the tank for McCain...

Fournier wrote those pieces in which he routinely unloaded on the leading Democratic candidates -- Edwards, Clinton, and Obama -- while thoroughly questioning their motives and their character.

Yet I have searched in vain for a single example from the primary season in which Fournier raised a column's worth of uncomfortable questions about McCain's motives and his character...

In fact, one of the few times that Fournier dedicated a column to the Republican primary battle was following the Michigan contest, which McCain lost to Mitt Romney. The win presented Romney with his one brief window of opportunity to knock McCain from his front-runner perch. Fournier unleashed a wild column targeting Romney and practically threw his body in front of McCain to protect his beloved candidate.

Boehlert highlighted a series of reports and columns in which Fournier has advanced unfounded assertions and used flagrantly biased language to promote McCain or belittle his rivals. He concluded, as many others had already, that Fournier has a man-crush on McCain.

The fact is, Fournier's McCain love runs deep and goes back years.

The Associated Press desperately needs to find a new Washington Bureau chief.

++++

See also the diary by trifecta, with extensive discussion.

The politico has a story tonight out that reveals that Ron Fournier, the DC bureau chief of the associated press almost became a communications staffer for John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.

In October 2006, the McCain team approached Fournier about joining the fledgling operation, according to a source with knowledge of the talks. In the months that followed, said a source, Fournier spoke about the job possibility with members of McCain’s inner circle, including political aides Mark Salter, John Weaver and Rick Davis.

Salter, who remains a top McCain adviser, said in an e-mail to Politico that Fournier was considered for "a senior advisory role" in communications.

Naturally, I clicked on the Yahoo! link to see who was finally calling out Our Media Stars on how they're in the tank for McCain.

My heart sank. It's from the AP. (Their TV writer, David Bauder, specifically.)

Yes we all got the intention of the cover, but were also aware of its dangers.  Well, here we have an AP article on this news story that, as so often AP has done, demonstrates its irresponsible journalistic practices.

The article glosses over the essence of the satire in reporting about the cover and reports only on its negative images.

Can the AP be trusted anymore?  In a word: No!!  A bombshell broke a while ago.  It's been reported that Ron Fournier, who is now the AP Washington bureau chief, was emailing Karl Rove over Pat Tillman's death.  What was discussed between them should shred any credibility the Associated Press has left.

Recently, the AP has been failing to uphold its standards of journalistic integrity. Josh Marshall at TPM has been documenting this carefully, even stating semi-facetiously that the AP has "endorsed" McCain. He has even charged the AP with bamboozlement over its distortion of Obama's Iraq stance.

In particular, AP writer Liz Sidoti (of McCain donut sprinkles fame: see first link) has written that: "On Iraq, he has gone from hard-line opposition to the war to more nuanced rhetoric that calls for a troop drawdown process that could last 16 months." Of course, this is patently false for Obama has always talked about a 16 month withdrawal. She also writes of Obama's Iraq stance: "a potentially flexible formulation that has troubled liberals."

However, this is also patently false. The uniform response from the liberal blogosphere has been condemnation of the media for distortion, not Obama.

Below I describe how you can take action. Please rec this diary to encourage others to do likewise.

I was reading an AP article about McCaingry attacking Obama on trade and saw this:

The likely Democratic nominee pledged to keep in place the federal government's 27-year moratorium on offshore drilling, and criticized McCain on changing his position on the matter. "The politics may have changed but the facts haven't," Obama said.

So, the genuises over at the AP no longer want dirty little hippie bloggers quoting their stories word for word. Instead, our new corporate overlords would prefer that we link to the article and then summarize what it is saying in our own words. However, like many of us on the intertubes I am a lazy SOB, so the way I see it there is only one solution to this intractable problem: Babelfish.

Just when you think the AP can't be any more idiotic, it turns out that they are.

[T]heir Terms of Use explicitly prohibit you, even if you’ve paid them, from quoting the Associated Press in order to criticize the Associated Press:

You shall not use the Content in any manner or context that will be in any way derogatory to the author, the publication from which the Content came, or any person connected with the creation of the Content or depicted in the Content. You agree not to use the Content in any manner or context that will be in any way derogatory to or damaging to the reputation of Publisher, its licensors, or any person connected with the creation of the Content or referenced in the Content [...]

Publisher reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher’s reputation.

Laughable.

AP:

I'LL DRINK TO THAT: In The Mix, a bar in San Francisco's Castro district, a group of men and women broke into applause as a large flat-screen television showed the first same-sex couple getting their wedding licenses in City Hall.

"They're iconic," said Michael Groark, 61, of the couple, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. "This is a tribute they deserve."

Groark said much has changed since he first moved to San Francisco in the 1970s when much of the gay community rejected the idea of marriage as an imitation of heterosexual values.

Sitting on the long polished bar, Tom Longland, 66, agreed.

"I see a change in attitudes and I hope it starts spreading outside California," Longland said.

Hey AP -- that's 120 words. Have your lawyers call my lawyers.

-------

Media experts are swarming over the AP's takedown notice against two bloggers, claiming that no one is allowed to excerpt from AP stories anymore. Remember the AP's idiotic assertion:

“Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” he said. “It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”

The dinosaurs at the AP think they know what the "spirit of the internet" is, and they claim it has nothing to do with copying pieces of information from other sources for purposes of criticism, education, or parody.

David Ardia at PBS' MediaShift Idea Lab examines the AP's claims and finds them legally lacking. They are. Without a doubt. Which is why I feel comfortable taunting them at the top of this page.

But aside from the AP's boneheaded wrongness, and aside from the law, there's one component of this story that's been bugging me, and it's this:

Mr. Kennedy said the company was going to meet with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association, a trade group, and others. He said he hopes that these discussions can all occur this week so that guidelines can be released soon.

What's there to discuss? As Atrios says:

[T]he AP is full of shit here and there's nothing to talk about. If they want to take this to court, they can, but there are no guidelines to be negotiated here. They don't write copyright law or get to determine its precise boundaries. It isn't for them to determine what is legal fair use and what isn't.

The Toronto Globe and Mail's Matthew Ingram:

[T]he AP doesn’t have to offer a “safe harbor” to bloggers or other media sites under certain circumstances. The fair use exemption under U.S. copyright law already does that, whether the newswire likes it or not (and clearly it doesn’t). If it wants to get someone to say whether a few sentences excerpted on a blog qualifies or not, then it can go to court and try to get a judge to do so. But sitting down and trying to negotiate some kind of blanket pass for something that is already permitted under law seems like a mug’s game.

The dumbasses at the Media Bloggers Association, of course, are walking right into that meeting because they crave nothing more than creating the impression that they, you know, represent bloggers (they don't). But anyone with an inkling of understanding of the law and principles at stake would know that the AP has no ground to stand on, and anything negotiated between them and the MBA will be ignored by the vast majority of bloggers anyway. If people haven't noticed, we're not the type of people that lets others do the talking for us. We do our own thing.

Lots of blogs are calling for boycotts of AP content. Not me. I'm going to keep using it. I will copy and paste as many words as I feel necessary to make my points and that I feel are within bounds of copyright law (and remember, I've got a JD and specialized in media law, so I know the rules pretty well). And I will keep doing so if I get an AP takedown notice (which I will make a big public show of ignoring). And then, either the AP -- an organization famous for taking its members work without credit -- will either back down and shut the hell up, or we'll have a judge resolve the easiest question of law in the history of copyright jurisprudence.

The AP doesn't get to negotiate copyright law. But now, perhaps, they'll threaten someone who can afford to fight back, instead of cowardly going after small bloggers.

I was going to make a big stink about this today, but it looks like the Associated Press is responding quickly to criticism:

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was “heavy-handed” and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers.

The quick about-face came, he said, because a number of well-known bloggers started criticizing its policy, claiming it would undercut the active discussion of the news that rages on sites, big and small, across the Internet [...]

All good? Maybe not.

Still, Mr. Kennedy said that the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items. And he said that he still believes that it is more appropriate for blogs to use short summaries of A.P. articles rather than direct quotations, even short ones.

“Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” he said. “It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”

The AP is going to lecture bloggers about what the "spirit of the internet" is all about? Laughable. And the AP certainly doesn't have free reign to rewrite copyright law on its own. Fair use provisions exist for a reason

If they don't back off this ridiculous notion, there will be litigation, and Daily Kos will be happy to be at the forefront of any such effort.

Hopefully, sanity (and their legal team) will prevail at the AP before we have to go down that path.