On the lower half of the front page of my local newspaper on Friday, we were introduced to a new journalistic tool. An Associated Press article by one Deb Riechmann appeared under the headline Bush takes credit for no terrorist attack. Was this intended to be a straight news story, or just a hack opinion piece masquerading as real reporting? The so-called reporter did not get out of the first sentence before the bias emerged in the mild sarcasm in saying the President was delivering his own first draft of history. She later includes notes of the approval ratings, Bush's defiant tone, the war in the Middle East and asserts that the current economic recession is the worst in generations.
Her disapproval was inappropriate and unappreciated. I listened to the speech live on radio, and Times readers would have been much better served by a simple verbatim reprint, without the negative spin from AP.
The reporter's work is made even worse, however, by the inclusion of the new journalistic tool: the juxtaposed column with bold red letters What he didn't say
introducing a list of contentious items. In it you read bailout criticism, complaining about No Child Left Behind imperfections, the embarrassing problem at a Walter Reed Medical Center building and blaming the man for everything less than instantaneous in the federal response to the damage done by Hurricane Katrina.
All of those complaints are debate items. For instance, the approval rating of the Democrat-controlled Congress is lower than that of Mr. Bush. His decision to push for the surge in Iraq secured relative peace there for President Obama to inherit. The recession is only unprecedented if you don't look back to 1980 to see the horrible mess former democrat President Jimmy Carter left for Reagan to fix. Do your research on the Community Reinvestment Act and the failed policies of Carter, Clinton, democrat leaders Barney Frank and Chris Cox to see the root causes of the credit, mortgage and financial derivatives markets fiasco. The Congress and Senate are all in cheerleading for the bailouts, NCLB is an improvement over the total lack of accountability it replaced, the Walter Reed building's condition was totally overblown in the hostile press and the hapless victims of Katrina in New Orleans were poorly served first by their democrat Mayor, and then by their democrat Governor.
Bush is far from my ideal president. However, he gave us the two Supreme Court Justices that handed down common sense readings of the meaning of the Second Amendment in the Heller decision last summer. For that and many other accomplishments, he earned my respect and sincere thanks.
The approach used by Riechmann and the AP is a cheap shot. However, now that it is out of the bag, we should expect to see it applied to statements and speeches by the new President Obama, his old friends, his new Cabinet advisers, his Senators, his Congressmen, our democratic Governor and other officials at all levels.
Just to make it interesting, AP should be sure the reporters assigned are checked to possess an equally obvious disrespect and antipathy for the person being sniped as Riechmann displayed against the retiring President Bush.
In case they forget to deliver the opposing viewpoints in future stories, when you see the Associated Press byline, remember this latest display of their biased reporting. Beware, be critical and look elsewhere for straight news.
Bruce Haas is a 1989 alumnus of Ohio University and writes from Marietta. 4
Opinion
Letter to the Editor
