AP could be acronym for 'Anti-Palin' or 'Attack Palin'

As we pointed out yesterday, the AP has made a mockery of its own claims:

"The Associated Press employs some of the best and most experienced journalists in the world. Each is dedicated to the same standards — fairness, balance and accuracy."

Like the content which comes off the AP wire, that high-minded statement is a lie. We're not the only ones to call them on it.

Dan Calabrese, in an op-ed for the North Star Writers Group, gets right to the point:

"Let’s just establish this right off the bat: The Associated Press lies. Not in every news story, necessarily, but when it wants to slant a story to serve its ideological bias, the AP has no compunction about flat-out lying."

Among his examples of AP prevarication, Calabrese cites the wire service's latest hit piece on Sarah Palin:

An AP headline screams: "AP NewsBreak: Palin implicated in ethics probe".

Oh my God! That sounds serious! And if you’re the AP, it’s a long-awaited reason for hope after the previous 19 ethics complaints against Palin were all summarily dismissed as frivolous and completely without merit.

[...]

Too bad it’s all complete nonsense. Too bad the actual "independent investigator" didn’t blame Palin at all for her situation, and instead blamed the State of Alaska for having such a ridiculous ethics process that a governor can face more than $500,000 in legal fees for bogus complaints, and isn’t supposed to raise money to help her pay the bills.

[...]

But you wouldn’t know it from reading the AP. They want so desperately for Palin to be guilty of something, they can’t stop themselves from running scandal-mongering headlines, even when there is no scandal.

R. A. Mansour says the AP smear job on Plain is just another example of media malpractice;

Rachel D’Oro erroneously reported that Gov. Palin was found in violation of the Ethics Act. That is completely false. The leaked document was a preliminary report -- the first part of a long process.

[...]

Only the Personnel Board can make the final determination about whether the Ethics Act was violated. There was no violation because the governor has not taking any money from the legal defense fund. No funds have been dispersed because they were waiting for the resolution of this issue. Therefore, Gov. Palin can not be charged with something she hasn’t even done yet.

Oh, yes she can, but only in the drive-by media. Sarah Palin was charged by the Associated Press, and it was just another in a long series of AP lies.

The AP's prevarications about Sarah Palin are nothing new, of course. In January, Steve Maloney showed that AP not only lies about Palin, but also manages to get the most obvious examples of it scrubbed from the Google search engine.

Also in January, Patterico called AP out for equating "the vicious attacks on Palin’s children to media photographers taking pictures of Sasha and Malia Obama when they entered their new school two weeks ago."

Eric Dondero caught AP red handed lying about the size of the crowd at an October Palin campaign event in Carson, California.

Early in October, WSJ's James Taranto exposed an AP smear job which called Palin a racist simply for questioning Obama's relationship with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.

With its long history of lying about Sarah Palin, we have to wonder if AP is not an acronym for "Associated Press" but "Anti-Palin" seems more descriptive -- or "Attack Palin" -- because that is what it does.

- JP