The version he asked Kauffmann to consider in its stead omitted all details of internal deliberations, briskly moving on to the Gormley’s defense of the story the AP ran.
On Friday, in the message where he further distanced himself from the detailed narrative presented in Thursday’s original e-mail by claiming he’d used “poetic license,” Gormley wrote Kauffmann that the original e-mail was written “to make the case for my efforts…and win back your trust,” contradicting a claim in the original e-mail where he claimed he wasn’t spilling the details for “credit.”
In the previous weeks, Gormley and Kauffmann were exchanging beer league softball stories over e-mail, and joking about the agony of having to sit though thirty-some minutes of ABC’s The View before the Governor took to the couch for a January appearance. In the Friday e-mail where Gormley claimed that he’d taken unjustifiable poetic license, he described what prompted him to write the draft.
Gormley closed by saying that “despite what I like to say about the accuracy of what I print, my email account was just wrong in tone and content,” apologized again, and then asked Kauffmann out for beers.
The e-mails do not reflect if they ever met to drink any.
(A selection of Gormley’s emails to Kauffmann can be downloaded as a .pdf here.)
"[T]he government’s power is overwhelming. It’s [sic] agents are armed and authorized to use force if they have to. . . . But power will not restrain itself. Those entrusted with it have to be watched. That is not meant as a political statement or a character assessment. It’s just a basic law of nature. The powerful have to be watched, and we are the watchers." -Tom Curley, President/CEO, The Associated Press
(ap.org/pages/about/whatsnew/hayspress.html)
If the "ethic[al]" AP had been doing its job all along, perhaps AP editors wouldn't be so desperate as to contrive tabloid-type scoops on small-time gangsters like Paterson. But oh well. Shill for the empire? Lose readers, revenue and relevance.
Please do more pieces like this, CJR. Readers and journalists alike need to see how "the world's largest and most trusted source of news and information" operates. For example, how the Jerusalem AP bureau interacts with (cows to) the Israel Project, CAMERA, and Israeli military censors when putting out a story which makes the Israeli terrorist state appear as victim versus the Palestinian women and children it is occupying, embargoing and bombing. And why AP editors always give the U.S. central govt the benefit of the doubt versus Iran, Syria, China, the Constitution, American individuals, common sense, etc.
#1 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Wed 1 Dec 2010 at 12:48 PM