A Tale of Two Stories
I just read a pair of news stories, one written by the AP’s Tom Raum (titled: Strategists: Bush Comeback Will Be Tough), the other by the Washington Times’ Joseph Curl and S.A. Miller (titled: GOP hopefuls still seek appearances with Bush).
Just to show you how differently people see things, consider this paragraph from Raum’s fiction novel:
But the clock is running. And Bush may already have passed the point of no return, suggested Paul C. Light, a professor of public policy at New York University. “Unless Bush and his advisers do something dramatic to reposition the administration and stop the slide in public approval, they’re going to find they have very few friends who want to come to the White House, let alone friends who want them to come to their districts,” Light said. “And that’s about the worst possible position for a president to be in.”
Next consider the opening paragraph in the Washington Times article:
The phones are ringing off the hook at the White House political affairs office with Republican candidates calling to ask President Bush to appear at fundraisers and campaign events. Despite a consensus among political pundits and Democrats that Mr. Bush was chiefly responsible for the Virginia gubernatorial loss Tuesday, the White House said yesterday that candidates from across the country continue to seek presidential appearances. “Our political affairs shop gets asked on virtually a daily basis for the president to come campaign for a candidate of our party, and I know he looks forward to doing so next year,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan told The Washington Times yesterday.
The average observer would say that these paragraphs are opposites of each other. They aren’t exactly opposites because Prof. Light is dealing mostly with hypothetical possibilities while the White House is dealing with verifiable facts. What these articles do show, though, is the AP’s anti-GOP bias.
This past week or so, Rush has said that many of the ‘news articles’ in the Agenda Media aren’t reports of what is happening but rather are a revelation of what they want to happen. I couldn’t agree more. After all, it’s all about the furtherance of the Agenda. Remember that the truth is a relative thing to activist liberals. There aren’t absolute, permanent truths to many of them.
The AP story does partially redeem itself with the last paragraph of the story. Here’s that last paragraph:
Former Nixon speechwriter Stephen Hess cautioned it’s always dangerous to write the obituary of prominent politicians, recalling Nixon’s 1968 comeback after losing the presidency in 1960 and the California governorship in 1962. Bush still has three years in office, “and three years in the life of a president is an eternity,” Hess said.
Stephen Hess is a serious man with a ton of wisdom. I wonder why his quote was buried in the last paragraph in the article instead of being used right after Prof. Light’s quotes. Was the AP hoping that people wouldn’t read the entire article? Did they bury Hess’s comments to paint as bleak a picture as possible about the Bush presidency? It certainly seems that Hess’s comments should’ve been featured more prominently than it was if the goal was to be fair and balanced about the subject.
Somehow, I doubt that was the AP’s goal.
Cross-posted at BoxerWatch
December 18th, 2005 at 6:08 pm
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