politics

AP Evolves Before Our Very Eyes

April 2, 2004

Thanks to the Poynter Institute’s Matt Thompson, who passed along one of his colleague’s observations about a rather striking inconsistency in the Associated Press’ campaign coverage. Turns out that while AP stories about Sen. John Kerry usually include a link to Kerry’s or the Democratic National Committee’s website at the bottom of the piece, stories about Bush’s quest for reelection have lacked such a link. And stories that mention both candidates tend to include a link to Kerry’s site, but not to Bush’s.

To illustrate our point, we direct you to these Kerry stories from March 19, March 25, March 25, March 25, March 26, and March 28, and these Bush campaign stories from March 25, March 25, March 25, March 26, and March 27. On March 28, we found an example of a story about both candidates that linked only to Kerry’s site.

So what’s behind this bizarre — and seemingly arbitrary — inconsistency? We spoke with an AP editor this week who told us that AP policy is to “link to all of the websites on all of the political stories.” She also told us that reporters, not editors, are responsible for including the links.

Does that mean AP reporters — even Nedra Pickler, who rabid liberals imagine to be a Bush partisan, and who wrote many of the stories cited above — are consciously directing people to Kerry while neglecting to do the same for Bush?

That seemed unlikely to us, so we called AP corporate communications for an official statement. Two nights ago media relations manager Jack Stokes responded via email, and here we reproduce his message in full:

This is the first presidential campaign in which URLs are being used at the bottom of stories. As such, the use of URLs is an evolving process.

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Ummm, thanks, Jack. We think.

Then, yesterday, the AP apparently righted itself, running a story about a Bush re-election fundraiser did indeed link to Bush’s website at the bottom.

The process, it seems, is “evolving.”

–Brian Montopoli

Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.