The AP’s Empty Gesture

freebeacon ^ | May 21, 2021

[MarvinStinson]

Firing the activist Emily Wilder won't fix the wire service's bigger problems

The Associated Press on Thursday announced it had parted ways with Emily Wilder, a cub reporter whose anti-Semitic tweets were the subject of a Washington Free Beacon report published two days earlier.

Wilder's "cancellation" has become the latest cause célèbre of the navel-gazing Beltway media, who are using the incident to accuse the right in general, and the Free Beacon in particular, of supporting the "cancel culture" we typically decry.

"Imagine being the world's largest news organization and caving to the Washington Free Beacon," tweeted the former AP correspondent Jonathan Myerson Katz, who called the brouhaha an embarrassment for the AP.

Wilder herself weighed in Thursday in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle: "There's no question I was just canceled," she said. "This is exactly the issue with the rhetoric around ‘cancel culture.'"

The Free Beacon report chronicled Wilder's history as a left-wing campus activist and her derision of the late Jewish billionaire Sheldon Adelson as a "naked mole rat." No fans of cancel culture, we oppose her dismissal, which appears to have been a result of the wire service's sensitivity to charges of anti-Israel bias and unprofessional conduct in its ranks after news reports revealed that its Gaza bureau shared an office building with the Hamas terror organization.

Anti-Israel bias, political activism, and intemperate social media posts clearly do not disqualify one for work at the AP, so Wilder's dismissal is puzzling if it is seen as anything other than an organization looking for a quick fix to a public relations headache.

Look no further than Gaza bureau chief Fares Akram, who has lionized the late terror leader Yasser Arafat—posting a photo of him to Facebook with the caption, "The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night"—who said in 2009 that he finds it "difficult to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza," and who was, before he joined the AP, an activist working as a consultant for the left-wing Human Rights Watch, which has labeled Israel an apartheid state.

Wilder is a kid whose radical college activism became a matter of public interest in light of the organization's tendentious Gaza coverage. Bad timing. Her firing also served as a cheap and convenient bone to toss to critics.

If the AP were serious in its concern that the broader public view it as an independent and sober source of news, it might take a closer look at a hiring process that greenlights political activists and a management that promotes them to positions of power and influence.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

Joan Wilder would never have written/said what Emily said! /sarc

[No_Mas_Obama]

Won’t fix anything BUT IT’S A DAMN GOOD START.

[CptnObvious]

CNN and the AP have been hemorrhaging viewers for years, but why? Why, year after year, layoffs after layoffs, losses upon losses do they continue down this destructive path.

Answer: They are on a, no holds barred, mission. That is why they ignore the layoffs, the losses and the hemorrhaging of viewers year after year.

They don't care about advertising dollar, but only the dollars from the sources like George Soros who is propping so many of them up.

If George Soros wants America smeared, then by God, he gets it. If he wants America deconstructed, he gets it. If he wants America declared fundamentally racist, he gets it. If he wants the family, husband wife and child(ren) declared obsolete, it will be ginned up.

The problem, now, for the mainstream press, is they stated there intent. They took sides against Trump and stated that they were deliberately doing it and Trump survived the onslaught.

I believe the American people have seen enough and know that these talking heads are talking to each other over the slimming of America. Whomever slimes it the most, it seems, is the winner.

But the writing is upon the wall. They know this from Journalism school. Go down the narrative path and you will find you can't get off of it. The narrative path will take you places you will not want to go. That path has a sign, "Danger, Severe Cliff up ahead" and you will not be able to stop.