As if we need another example of AP bias, this "news" agency is hard at work presenting the tea party protests as a sort of spontaneous grassroots movement. While this site and others have worked hard to expose the obviously astroturfed movement, apparently this has all sailed right over the head of Joe Biesk, AP journalist extraordinaire.
This latest garbage from the AP is particularly salient as someone at yahoo news, to their credit, woke up and replaced it with a less biased AFP article.
More below the fold....
So I was checking my now seldom used yahoo mail account, which upon logging off dumps the hapless user to the disaster area which is the main yahoo homepage. This page is a sad shell of its former self. In the early days of the internet it was a nice, clean launching pad to surfing the internet, something like google is now. Now it a jumbled mess of information where one can catch up on Miley Cyrus's latest doings or learn about "9 ways to be happy". It is what happens when an internet company becomes obsessed with pageviews and the bottom line, and forgets what they had set out to do in the beginning. But I digress...
One of their first news links caught my eye, an AP story entitled "Anti-Obama 'tea party' protests mark US tax day". I took the bait.
From the first paragraph, the AP agenda is obvious:
Protesters began gathering at state Capitols and in neighborhoods and town squares across the country Wednesday to kick off a series of tax-day protests designed to echo the rebellion of the Boston Tea Party. Demonstrators said they're steamed about government spending since President Barack Obama took office.
One would walk away from this lead thinking that the protests were spontaneous. Not until the fourth paragraph is there a mention that FreedomWorks is promoting these tea parties. There is not a single quote or viewpoint from the left or even the middle in the entire article. Instead the reader is treated to these sorts of statements:
Organizers say the movement has developed organically through online social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and through exposure on Fox News.
And while they insist it's a nonpartisan effort, it has been seized on by many prominent Republicans who view it as a promising way for the party to reclaim its momentum.
"It is a nonpartisan mass organizing effort comprised of people unhappy with size of government. All you have to be is a mildly awake Republican candidate for office to get in front of that parade," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.
To the credit of yahoo, the article was eventually replaced with this AFP piece, a much more respectable work.
The AFP article appropriately airs the criticism of these faux protests in the lead paragraph:
Critics of President Barack Obama marked national tax day Wednesday with "tea party" protests that Republicans are calling the birth of a grassroots opposition, but Democrats dismiss as a fraud.
Kagro X is even quoted further down:
But Democrats scathingly attacked the tea parties as an imitation grass roots movement manufactured by fringe elements of the right.
The tea parties "have been largely a creation of the same gang that already ran conservatism off the rails," wrote David Waldman on the liberal Daily Kos politics blog.
The AFP piece is not perfect, and I would have liked to see them expound more on how this whole movement is astroturfing, but perhaps this is my own personal bias showing through. The venerable AFP certainly makes an attempt to be balanced. The AP article has no such illusions.
Kudos to AFP and Yahoo for stepping in and and stopping this teabagging of the public before the..... uhhh... climax? Sorry, had to squeeze in a cheap teabagging joke in there somewhere.