The great Charles Hanley reminds me why I grew up admiring journalists:

War is “an abomination, an evil,” and will one day be banished to the dustbin of history, but only if reporters are able to get to the truth, said Hanley.

For 161 years The AP has been committed to a single mission: communicating facts, said Hanley. “It’s the closest thing to a straight news source. There’s no advertising, no hyperventilating over exclusives,” he said.

But in times of war its efforts are sometimes stymied by military and government bureaucracies that want to control the story. That is the case in Afghanistan and Iraq where the military has adopted corporate-like public relations models.  Read more 

Get a load of this lead from AP’s Deb Reichmann. Under the headline:

Rove keeps up heat on Clinton

(I know, I know, the editors write the headlines, and they’re even worse than the stenographers) we get this hacktacular lead:

HELLMOUTH CRAWFORD, Texas - Master GOP strategist Karl Rove won’t let up in his attacks on Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton, but the intriguing question is why.

No, that’s not the intriguing question at all.  Read more 

Yeah, it’s getting to be like torture. Thanks, Kathleen Hennessy of the AP, for this stellar, stenographic work:

Clinton initially opposed cutting off funds for the troops [unlike the evildoers who would vote for such a thing], but said Wednesday that she believed last week’s vote was cast in support of soldiers abroad.

Hennessy actually drops a Republican Big Lie right into her “story.” Unbelievable?  Read more 

Now I know that reporters are not responsible for headlines, copy editors are. So when I see this story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution headlined Prospective Democratic Chairs All Liberal I got a Cheney-like lip curl reflex. We may know better, but to the Great Unwashed “liberal” is still a code word for All Evil In The World. But I read the story anyway.  Read more