AP Withdraws Bogus Article Claiming Rand Paul Said Voters Want To Round Up Immigrants

Newsbusters ^ | February 17, 2013 | Noel Sheppard

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Politico hours ago released a Bulletin Kill from the wire service withdrawing an article published earlier in the day with the inflammatory headline "Sen. Paul: Voters Want to Round Up Immigrants"

Perhaps the AP should be sued for $2 billion. Something has to be done to put a stop to character assassination attempts by the media using clearly false information. IMO, we have too many examples of the liberal media getting caught, but getting off with zero punishment or admonishment

That, IMHO, is exactly the right tack which should and must be taken. The AP is the nexus of the entire problem of “bias” in “the media.” When the AP came into being in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, print journalism was “the media.” Except that print journalism was notorious for not agreeing about much of anything - entirely the opposite of the situation we have faced all our lives. IMHO it is the AP which is responsible for that change. After all, what is the AP newswire if not a 24/7 virtual meeting of all the major journalism outlets??? And what did Adam Smith say about that sort of thing?

"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices."

The “conspiracy against the public” which is the AP has produced a homogeneous journalism which may, incidentally, contain controversy on editorial pages but which promotes as “objective” news which promotes journalism as such and, for that reason, promotes politicians which cooperate in promoting journalism. Journalism promotes politicians by giving them positive labels such as “liberal,” "progressive,” or “moderate.” The “liberal” politician and the “objective” journalist cooperate in slandering the people by casting aspersions on anyone whom the people need to trust, no matter how honorable and diligent they may be.

The AP was found in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act back in 1945, but nothing much came of it because the AP was “too big to fail.” Its mission, the conservation of scarce and expensive bandwidth in the transmission of news, was seen as too important. At this late date bandwidth is dirt cheap, so the mission of the AP is obsolete. It should be sued into oblivion.

The AP is the source of the “objective” journalism con. It is honorable to try to be objective, and it is even honorable to claim to be trying to be objective - but to claim actually to be objective, or to belong to an organization which you know will claim it for you, is blatant sophistry meriting only contempt.