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The AP’s Fournier considered role with McCain campaign

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The practice of jumping between the political and media worlds is not especially uncommon, and journalists routinely leave news outlets to pursue opportunities in professional politics. David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s chief strategist, used to be a reporter. Linda Douglass, up until recently employed by National Journal, also joined Obama’s team. In perhaps the most well-known example, Tony Snow left a media job to join Bush’s White House, and then went back to the media.

That said, this is slightly more troubling than most.

Before Ron Fournier returned to The Associated Press in March 2007, the veteran political reporter had another professional suitor: John McCain’s presidential campaign.

In October 2006, the McCain team approached Fournier about joining the fledgling operation, according to a source with knowledge of the talks. In the months that followed, said a source, Fournier spoke about the job possibility with members of McCain’s inner circle, including political aides Mark Salter, John Weaver and Rick Davis.

Salter, who remains a top McCain adviser, said in an e-mail to Politico that Fournier was considered for “a senior advisory role” in communications.

“He did us the courtesy of considering the offer before politely declining it,” Salter said.

That Fournier would consider a role with the McCain campaign is not especially surprising; his political leanings have been increasingly apparent of late. We learned two weeks ago that Fournier exchanged emails with Karl Rove about Pat Tillman, in which Fournier wrote, “The Lord creates men and women like this all over the world. But only the great and free countries allow them to flourish. Keep up the fight.” Fournier was also one of the journalists who, at a gathering of the nation’s newspaper editors, extended John McCain a box of his favorite donuts (“Oh, yes, with sprinkles!” McCain said).

But Fournier is the DC bureau chief of the Associated Press. He’s chiefly responsible for directing the AP’s coverage of the presidential campaign. And yet, Fournier’s objectivity is hardly above reproach — he considered an offer to work for one of the two candidates.

Regular readers know that I’ve been highlighting some of the unusually bad coverage of the presidential campaign from the AP. It’s been striking, in part because it’s unexpected — the AP has not exactly earned a reputation of being the Fox News of wire services. For the AP to do so many poor reports in such a short time made it seem as if the outlet had undergone some kind of deliberate shift, orchestrated by Fournier.

Earlier this month, we learned that Fournier is executing a kind of experiment in campaign reporting.

Fournier is a main engine in a high-stakes experiment at the 162-year old wire to move from its signature neutral and detached tone to an aggressive, plain-spoken style of writing that Fournier often describes as “cutting through the clutter.”

The idea sounds like it has merit, but there’s a problem in the execution.

In March, for example, Fournier wrote an item — whether it was a news article or an opinion piece was unclear — that said Barack Obama is “bordering on arrogance,” “a bit too cocky,” and that the senator and his wife “ooze a sense of entitlement.” To substantiate the criticism, Fournier pointed to … not a whole lot. It was basically the Republicans’ “uppity” talking point in the form of an AP article.

But the AP’s coverage has deteriorated since — and it goes beyond just the AP giving John McCain donuts and McCain giving the AP barbecue. There was the slam-job on Obama that read like an RNC oppo dump, followed by a scathing, 900-word reprimand of Obama’s decision to bypass the public financing system in the general election, filled with errors of fact and judgment.

When Obama unveiled his faith-based plan, the AP got the story backwards. When Obama talked about his Iraq policy on July 3, the AP said he’d “opened the door” to reversing course, even though he hadn’t.

The AP’s David Espo wrote a hagiographic, 1,200-word piece, praising McCain’s “singular brand of combative bipartisanship,” which was utterly ridiculous.

The AP pushed the objectivity envelope a little further with a mind-numbing, 1,100-word piece on Obama “being shadowed by giant flip-flops.”

The AP flubbed the story on McCain joking about killing Iranians, and then flubbed the story about McCain’s promise to eliminate the deficit. It’s part of a very discouraging trend for the AP that’s been ongoing for a while now.

And then, as these examples pile up, we learn that the journalist responsible for directing the AP’s coverage of the presidential campaign considered joining one of the candidate’s campaign teams.

Did it not occur to the Associated Press that this might raise questions about the objectivity of the wire service’s coverage?

Sandy Johnson, the former DC bureau chief of the AP, was asked about Fournier and the bureau when she was forced out as part of a staff shake-up. “I just hope he doesn’t destroy it,” she said.

Comments

  • TR

    says:

    Does the AP have stockholders, or any kind of discernible business structure?

    Ideology aside, the people who make their money off the AP have got to realize that this partisan hack is destroying their once-venerable brand.

  • TomB

    says:

    Vermont’s longtime and highly respected AP Bureau Chief Chris Graff was ousted a few years ago for what appears to be political reasons. Apparently he didn’t do enough to make Vermont Democrats look bad. (The officials reasons were not released.)

  • slappy magoo

    says:

    who’s to say Fournier ISN’T working for McCain?

    He might not have a desk at campaign HQ, but still…

  • Goldilocks

    says:

    Free Market meet Free Press. What can be done?

    That this degeneration has followed Rupert Murdoch’s accession to AP’s board of directors is hardly a coincidence. In Britain, at least, there are strict limits on the quantity of media outlets any one owner or organization can control. Is there not some such regulation also in America?

  • Ohioan

    says:

    Thanks to blogs like this one and mediamatters.org, finally politico.com is taking this seriously and you know the MSM kind of likes politico.com.

    So even though the outrage has been out there, glad to see it’s picking up steam.

    The only question is, will Fournier still keep his job? If so, that means the problem is more higher up than we thought…

  • Jasper

    says:

    Let’s examine the words”work for” versus “serve.” It seems to me that in D.C. your nominal employer, who you “work for,” is often not whose interests you serve. Maybe Fournier decided the best way to “serve” the GOP was “working for” AP as bureau chief rather than directly for any campaign.

    Paulson no longer “works for” Goldman Sachs, but my guess is he’s never been a more valuable servant of the firm than he is now as Treasury Secretary. I doubt any of the dozens of Bush “Pioneers” and “Rangers” who took jobs working for the Administration did so to serve the American people.

  • Sprinkle Media

    says:

    I can only imagine the howling on the right about media bias if the DC bureau chief of the Associated Press wrote an op ed / article saying John McCain “has more baggage than Samsonite”.

    (What Fournier said about Hillary Clinton)

    The guy is a hack, and the AP needs to be labeled as such.

  • kevo

    says:

    Emotive Ron needs to recuse himself from political editing decisions this election season – it would be the only honorable pathway he could take at this time to help restore APs reputation.

    The management structure over at AP should get with it or AP will find itself in the dust bin of credibility. Why read partisan AP newswires when the blogosphere offers so much more in so much rapid time than AP could ever keep up with, as it continues its descent into opinionated news coverage. -Kevo

  • Steve

    says:

    Fournier is merely one of a myriad “McQuislings”—and between him, the other hacks, and Murdoch, it should be quite safe to re-label the once-respectable wire service, thus:

    Anschluss Press

    It is now of the greatest—and to more than a few within the current administration and its cacophony of cretinous criminalities, the gravest—importance that they wrest control of as many of this nation’s institutions as is possible, in order to maintain their grasp on power. Murdoch is overtly connected to the FOX meme of “the right to lie with impunity,” and Fournier is now the link between this concept and the furtherance of it into the institution formerly known as “Associated Press.”

    As the media propaganda collective grows, it will produce more lies in a carousel manner; each simultaneously citing the “new truth” as reported by another in a “musical-chairs-of-deceit” type of shell game, where it will become increasingly impossible to find the original perpetrator of the lie—this preventing the exposure of the lie….

  • Tom Cleaver

    says:

    Ideology aside, the people who make their money off the AP have got to realize that this partisan hack is destroying their once-venerable brand.

    Given that Rupert Murdoch bought AP, what makes you think Fournier isn’t doing exactly what he was hired to do?

    Gad, the world would be such a much better place if a certain Australian airman had failed to survive the really bad crash of his airplane in 1917 (Rupert Murdoch’s father, who came home on sick leave after the crash and sired him).

  • Always hopeful

    says:

    If it’s true that Rupert Murdoch owns AP then it’s just a hopeless cause. Boycott is the only option. Too bad it doesn’t work for Fox News, since a TV station is harder to boycott. Most people who watch FOX probably don’t even know they are being rooked. If it’s on TV it will get viewers.

  • libra

    says:

    I’ve noticed — over the past week or two — that NYT seems to have cut down on their use of AP and increased their use of Reuters. Connection?

  • Joey

    says:

    He already has destroyed the credibility of the AP. In a short time he’s managed to make anything coming from the AP be viewed with suspicion due to recent biased and slanted articles in their campaign coverage. It did not come across as opinion but more as hit pieces. A respected news service suddenly becomes untrustworthy leaving many of us shaking our heads at the loss of semi-fair campaign news coverage. What a shame.