AP’s Fournier to Rove: ‘Keep up the fight’

July 15, 2008

In March, when John McCain appeared at a gathering of the nation’s newspaper editors, he was greeted by two journalists from the Associated Press, who extended the Republican senator a box of his favorite donuts (“Oh, yes, with sprinkles!” McCain said). One of the journalists was the AP’s DC bureau chief, Ron Fournier.

We talked a bit about Fournier yesterday, and the changes he’s bringing to the AP’s coverage of the presidential campaign. Fournier calls his new approach “accountability journalism” and “liberating…the truth.”

It’s led, unfortunately, to hopelessly flawed journalism, but there’s new evidence that leads to questions about the ideology underpinning Fournier’s work at the AP.

Yesterday, the House Oversight Committee, investigating the mythmaking surrounding Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch, issued a 50-page report (.pdf) on the administration’s efforts. Buried on page 21 was this tidbit:

Karl Rove exchanged e-mails about Pat Tillman with Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier, under the subject line “H-E-R-O.” In response to Mr. Fournier’s e-mail, Mr. Rove asked, “How does our country continue to produce men and women like this,” to which Mr. Fournier replied, “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.”

Keep up what fight?

Responding to questions, Fournier said Monday, “I was an AP political reporter at the time of the 2004 e-mail exchange, and was interacting with a source, a top aide to the president, in the course of following an important and compelling story. I regret the breezy nature of the correspondence.”

No, this couldn’t possibly raise fresh questions about the objectivity of the Associated Press’ DC bureau. Not at all. Perish the thought.

As for the rest of the report, House investigators hoped to learn more, but found that most of the officials involved with the Tillman and Lynch stories had striking memory lapses and were surprisingly unhelpful.

But the White House nevertheless ends up looking pretty bad, based on the available information.

In the case of Tillman’s April 22, 2004, death, White House officials generated nearly 200 e-mails on the matter the day after, the committee found. Politics seemed to fuel the administration’s interest: Several of the e-mails came from the staff of President Bush’s re-election campaign, urging Bush to respond publicly.

The White House “rushed” to release a public statement of condolence at about noon on April 23.

But in doing so, the White House violated a military policy enacted into law by Bush himself in 2003, the committee found. The Military Family Peace of Mind Act bars the announcement of a casualty until 24 hours after a family is notified.

The Defense Department, adhering to the policy, had not yet publicly confirmed Tillman’s death when the White House released Bush’s statement of condolence.

Realizing this belatedly, White House spokewoman Claire Buchan warned her colleagues in an e-mail: “alert _ do not use Tillman statement.” But news services were already running the White House statement.

The White House also failed to determine whether information about Tillman’s death was classified, the committee found. Tillman’s Ranger unit was routinely involved in sensitive operations along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

As for Fournier, it’s still unclear what “fight” he wanted Karl Rove to keep up.

This clown is unbelievable. This isn’t surprising, given the donuts-and-barbecue nonsense, but just confirms our suspicions.

But exactly what can we do to smack the AP down? Contact our local papers with complaints, and see if they’ll drop the wire feed? Shame the AP reporters so they push back? What?

  • He should have been forced to resign for the donuts. I can’t imagine any circumstance under which that kind of ass-kissing of a journalistic subject in public would be acceptable. Changing the Washington bureau into an opinion shop is just further malpractice on Fournier’s part.

  • “No, no, I was just kissing his ass. It was presumptively off the record! It’s improper for you to even be asking me about it!”

    Pretty much every reporter in DC needs to move into marketing, and let some dedicated college newspaper writer take their place.

  • I regret the breezy nature of the correspondence

    Because as we all know, breeziness is THE cardinal sin of journalism. That’s what concerns us most, out here in general-public land. Just can’t stand the breezy. Won’t have it.

    Rank out-and-out political favoritism? No big. But breeziness? Fire the bastid! Unless of course he has the genuine courage to admit it and forthrightly apologize, as here. That’s all right then.

  • The Associated Press functions like a news co-op. Newspapers that subscribe to the AP can publish any story that comes over the AP “wire”. (It’s been 20 years since I was in a newsroom, and I’m sure they aren’t using a teletype machine anymore. Maybe someone can enlighten me.)

    The AP has their own reporters that submit stories, and the AP also picks up stories that might have a national interest that are published in local papers that subscribe to the AP, and that are written by the papers’ reporters. Getting stories picked up by the AP enhances the reputation of a local paper.

    Anyway, there’s not much that can be done to the AP because there’s not really an alternative to AP. There are other news services, like Reuters, but their emphasis is international rather than American.

    Maybe am expose’ from well-known news outlets like CNN might get AP to be a little less embarrassingly biased.

  • Remember that when they were handing McCain the donuts with the sprinkles on them, just the way John likes it, they were railing into Obama. That’s all you need to know about how they view the two candidates – Rove and McCain are close friends. Obama’s crashing the country club.

    I’d like to know the timeline, here. Is this while Tilman was being pumped up as a hero, or after questions surfaced? Keep up the fight against the media to protect the WH narrative?

  • The AP needs to be boycotted or at least severely embarrassed. I don’t know how possible that is considering so many news organizations subscribe to it, but this kind of “journalism” is irresponsible for the type of service it provides. They should simply present facts. Spinning the facts one way or another should be the prerogative of bloggers or end-user news organizations.

    I don’t understand people like Fournier, Rove, Bush, etc. who place ideology and winning above the law and their own professional integrity.

  • Well Fournier certainly learned something from Karl Rove, how to apologize for something that’s not the problem in order to distract from the actual issue. I love the rank falsity of the right wing god-speak on Fournier’s part, it’s as sleazily transparent as a pickup line.

  • The worst thing is that Fournier knows that no one will really ever know that the AP is in the tank for McCain, and with today’s media conglomerates, he’s probably right. Yesterday McCain’s “Czecholslovakia” brain fart got ignored completely, like so many others, and I’m pretty sure we’re all in for a very long fall campaign, full of shit where the media covers for it’s candidate.

    We’re not quite in Putin territory yet, but we sure are moving in that direction.

  • When the photograph surfaced showing Fournier and Rove in bed together, and it was pointed out that Fournier was apparently the “woman” in the relationship, Fournier defended his honor saying:

    “I was interacting with a source, a top aide to the president, in the course of following an important and compelling story. I regret the breezy nature of the intercourse.”

  • Sort of OT but the AP and Glen Greenwald (and the exception when Mr. Benen is subbing the “War Room”) were the only reason to visit Salon.com these days.. Okay, only Greenwald and you can read Benen here.

  • Fournier is actually a top Democrat operative. It’s clever stuff. He wheedles himself into the Republicans’ affections and then he starts plying their presumptive nominee with high-calorie, high-cholesterol goodies. A few donuts here. A few BBQ burgers there.

    Before you know it, McCain is too full to get on the Straight-From-My-Wife Jet and make his campaign stops. At worst, he is stricken with a Fournier-induced coronary event.

    It’s crazy stuff. But it might just work.

  • Taritac said:
    The AP needs to be boycotted or at least severely embarrassed. I don’t know how possible that is considering so many news organizations subscribe to it, but this kind of “journalism” is irresponsible for the type of service it provides.

    IIRC it’s even SOP for CB to cite AP. This is FUBAR.

  • It really is seriously bad stuff with little we can do about it. But at least we now know exactly what we’re dealing with, and after the past 48 hours, Ron Fournier and the AP know we know.

  • AP is now not to be trusted to give us commoners the real poop on the issues of the day. Fournier’s hand has been shown for what it is – a flippant coziness with sources and a penchant to make the news “more emotive” leading to a smarmy attitude contemptuous of his audience of non-sources. The man should resign! -Kevo

  • The mere fact that Fournier chooses to characterize his correspondence with the word “breeezy,” as opposed to so many other, more suitable words (albeit less favorable to him), tells you all you need to know about the future accuracy and reliability of the AP under his reign.

  • I understand that the AP is the big gorilla and that economies of scale will seriously figure in here, but… why haven’t reputable bloggers arranged their own alternative? It used to be expensive to run wire to every newsroom; now it’s just a link.

  • It’s been 20 years since I was in a newsroom, and I’m sure they aren’t using a teletype machine anymore. Maybe someone can enlighten me.

    They didn’t have them in there about 10 years ago — they had a computer set up for it, although it wasn’t exactly a high-end machine (it was a small paper, though, so who knows). Of course, the AP still has many teletype-inspired rules that are clinically stupid with modern word processing. Oh well.

    As far as the topic goes …

    The donut incident should have been grounds for dismissal due to the ricockulous breach of journalistic ethics.

    When I took the class, sources were stressed as important, yet potentially dangerous — it’s often easy to get too close to a source and let personal feelings and/or biases interfere with solid reporting. Sure, as humans it’s perhaps impossible to remove all feeling or bias, but the goal is to reduce it to a point where they stay out of reporting.

    Sadly, we’ve come to a point where people have either confused that theory with stenography (“He said, she said!” is not journalism), or decided to drop all pretense and just let the bias and the feeling flow.

    And in both cases, the public gets screwed.

    Actual truth becomes irrelevant and the only messages people hear are what those in control want to be heard. It’s propaganda at it’s worst: peddled as neutral truth, rather than the lie-filled truckload of horseshit it actually is.

    Granted, it’s been like this in America since … well, forever.

    But one of these days it’d be nice if we could have a functioning, competent, accurate media, rather than the collection of twits, flakes and frauds we have now.

  • and the AP also picks up stories that might have a national interest that are published in local papers that subscribe to the AP, and that are written by the papers’ reporters. Getting stories picked up by the AP enhances the reputation of a local paper.

    They also lift stories from non-subscribing weekly papers, change a word here and a word there, and send them out on the wire flagged “Associated Press.”

    I know, because it happened to me. The AP stole two stories I wrote about land-use controversies involving the BLM and cattle ranchers in southwest Idaho. One morning in 1997 I was perusing The Idaho Statesman (Boise) when I came upon an AP-bylined story that sounded awfully familiar. They’d changed it slightly, but otherwise it was my story, published virtually word-for-word. The next day the same piece appeared in the Idaho Press-Tribune (Caldwell/Nampa).

    My boss phoned the AP, demanding an explanation. They denied even doing it. We couldn’t sue, because we were a small paper with limited resources. It wasn’t merely plagiarism, it was wholesale theft, and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it. It happened again a few months later, with another piece.

    So fuck the AP. Ethical journalism is something they do not practice. Their right-turn into full propaganda mode doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.

  • “How does our country continue to produce men and women like this,” to which Mr. Fournier replied, “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.”

    What a pair of patronizing, hypocritical pieces-of-shit.

    Hey, Turdblossom, Valerie Plame was one of those “men and women” when she was at CIA.

  • Print news is dead, with broadcast not far behind – the AP knows this, which is why they want to start billing bloggers

  • You want to know how bad the reputation of the press is now? Last night, the season premiere of “The Closer” had a story in which a reporter for the LA Times comes about “this close” to completely botching a criminal investigation with his arrogance and his decision that he “knew” who had done what. He gets really raked over the coals by the investigators, and in the end it’s shown that the person he thought was giving him the right information was the guilty party. There is an attitude of total contempt toward this character throughout the story, and he is played “dislikable” by the actor portraying the character. And it is written in such a way that even this First Amendment true believer wanted to see the guy be the victim he was told he might become.

    This is not good news for the press, that a “liberal” show like “The Closer” would go after the press in a more thorough way than any conservative writer could ever get away with in Hollywood.

    We do need a free press, but guys like Fournier are the best argument in favor of shooting “reporters” I have run across, and this attitude on the part of a signficant part of the “liberal” audience is not a good thing for the press. They are digging their own grave with this crap. Come next January 21, there’s going to be a lot of “payback” distributed, and these morons are going to be surprised how much of it gets dropped on their head.

  • But one of these days it’d be nice if we could have a functioning, competent, accurate media, rather than the collection of twits, flakes and frauds we have now.

    Unfortunately, with notable exceptions who are notable for being exceptions, this is the way the press has been in American since forever. Go look at the 1800 election.

  • Unfortunately, with notable exceptions who are notable for being exceptions, this is the way the press has been in American since forever. Go look at the 1800 election.
    –Tom Cleaver

    Well, yeah … that’s why I mentioned that it’s been this way since forever.

    🙂

    And, of course, the 1800 election you reference was, perhaps, the most slanderous campaign in history. Yet Thomas Jefferson has his own monument and Adams is forgotten by most.

    Maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised at how crappy our media is. After all, one of our founding fathers set the standard.

    **shrugs shoulders**

  • Rather than shoot the bad messengers (#24) — I saw the same “Closer” and delighted that for a few minutes where that loathsome reporter was really really scared, but the problem with being a liberal is we don’t condone violence unless attacked (though it can be argued that these liars are attacking us at our very core) — we should just consign them to their special ring in hell, that of the flacks and other professionally paid spinners and liars (politicians, agents) and let them sell soap. There are, still, people who believe in truth and justice and the American way, and believe it’s not a comix fantasy either. Benen, for example. A lot of the former, furious newspaper reporters who read this site (this writer included).

  • Actually, we may need to thank the right-wing for something. They have spent so much time demonizing the press, complaining about the “liberal” media, and whining about “leftist” commentators that they’ve effectively “shot themselves in the foot.” The public no longer trusts news organizations that they have, corruptly or otherwise, bought and homogenized into tabloids and marketing devices.

  • “Maybe am expose’ from well-known news outlets like CNN might get AP to be a little less embarrassingly biased.”

    now THAT is a funny!

    • Comments are closed.