Wednesday, March 1, 2006
My Tucson: Much of bias from wire services, not local media
BARNEY BRENNER
Tucson Citizen
With population growing and people hungry for news, circulation for newspapers is stagnant - or in decline.
The Tucson Citizen, the oldest continuously published paper in Arizona, is no exception.
Part of this is "new media" - blogs and talk radio. Info is available 24/7.
But some of the decline, as evidenced by the occasional letter to the editor, is because many readers perceive bias in their newspaper.
While more folks are reading publications for free online, they're likely less willing to pay for what they believe is agenda-driven material.
Local papers excel at some things - local news, sports, weather, area events.
For national or international news, they must rely on others - a few large newspapers and wire services.
Among wire services, The Associated Press is the biggest by far and the one used by the Citizen.
I'm not alone in discerning AP bias, frequently with regard to the Bush administration. The Cheney hunting accident is a good example.
In a Feb. 17 AP piece in the Citizen ("VP turned 'nonstory' into 'huge negative story'"), Republicans essentially said the matter could have been handled better.
But the AP, citing "critics," described Cheney as "aloof" and "isolated," and former Clinton operative Lanny Davis criticized "a vice president with so much power and so little accountability."
Strange, but I don't recall Davis using those suitable words to describe a "co-president" who presided over a secretive task force trying to socialize our medical system.
Speaking of Hillary Clinton, here's a parallel that, like the Cheney incident, landed the victim in the hospital.
Just weeks after 9/11, when fears were high, Hillary and her driver, rushing to a fundraiser, blew through an airport security checkpoint. They hit a law enforcement officer who was shouting at them to stop and holding on for 300 feet while banging on the vehicle.
The sympathy was with Hillary, who was described as "uninjured" in one of the few stories, none from the AP.
Yet there have been hundreds of stories about the Cheney accident, all for an event that directly affected only the involved parties and was reported the next morning.
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