Results: The leftism of the Associated Press

The Associated Press appears to have had a rough Wednesday on account of unforced errors committed by the ideologues in its midst. They had to walk back claims about scalpings, racism, and plagiarists on Wednesday. Have you ever noticed that the AP seems to have a left bias in their reporting?

In three glaring instances, reporters at the New York City-based media agency managed to get their inaccurate and partisan hot takes cleared by editors, then published. While the AP has never been immune to leftist bias and inaccuracy — having all but brought the world to the brink with an erroneous November 2022 report that Russia had launched a missile strike on a NATO nation — the agency's rapid sequence of bad hot takes this week prompted an especially scathing response from critics. Do you think it is shameful that a "reputable" news agency has repeatedly published false information simply because it conformed to their bias without any reasonable attempt to verify anything?

While Claudine Gay's resignation from Harvard ostensibly highlighted that there remained some consequences in academia for scholarly misconduct, the AP instead ran an article entitled, "Harvard president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism." Critics wondered how Gay's deficit of integrity and alleged tendency to pass off the work of others as her own in at least seven of her published works amounted to a "conservative weapon." Others contemplated why a university president's self-destructive behavior needed be framed in partisan terms. Is this a clear example of the left bias of the reporting agency - or at least the reporter?

Deep in the Gay article, the AP's Collin Binkley and Moriah Balingit highlighted a tweet from New College of Florida board member and Hillsdale College fellow Christopher Rufo wherein he wrote, "SCALPED," in response to the news that Gay had resigned. The AP claimed that Rufo had done so "as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans." Just as with its suggestion that a leftist university leader's questionable practices were the fault of conservatives, the article's racially charged and ahistorical statement about scalping prompted backlash. Do you think claiming white colonists were scalping people is a legitimate way to defend someone accused of plagiarism?

The Associated Press wasn't a punchline Wednesday only on account of its revisionist history and title claim about the weaponization of Gay's apparent use of copy and paste. The agency also published an article entitled "Things to know about Minnesota's new, non-racist state flag and seal," concerning the Minnesota Emblems Redesign Commission's final decision on a new state flag. Whereas the old flag, which the AP apparently concluded was necessarily racist, depicts an Indian riding a horse and a farmer plowing his field, the new flag by 24-year-old white designer Andrew Prekker is a minimalist, starred tricolor bearing some resemblance to the colors flown by a Somali state. Facing additional lampoonery over its suggestion that the old state flag was racist and the new flag wasn't, the AP, apparently not committed to its characterization, changed the title to "Things to know about Minnesota's new state flag and seal." Does the fact that a "news organization" keeps having to change it's headlines an indication that they need to do a better job of editing their own material before publishing and then suffering backlash from the public?