Salem Radio Blasts AP For One-Sided '2016' Fact Check

A story and a Follow up on the Liberal media's crappy reporting!

Salem Radio Network (SRN), the home of conservative talk radio show hosts Michael Medved, Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, and Mike Gallagher, is holding the liberal Associated Press’s (AP) feet to the fire. The AP has been leaning left for years, and Salem, a major subscriber to AP, had been upset. Finally, however, AP crossed the line; they offered an “analysis” (read: “fact check”) of Dinesh D’Souza’s wildly successful documentary 2016.

Tom Tradup, the Vice-President of News & Talk Programming for Salem, was attending the Republican National Convention when he saw the write-up in AP. He fired off a letter:

As I am overseeing our SRN News coverage and four SRN nationally-syndicated talk programs here in Tampa during the 2012 Republican National Convention, I’ve been “off the radar” a bit on checking my AP files. However, I just saw the Associated Press “analysis” of Dinesh D’souza’s documentary by Beth Fouhy.

As Vice President of SRN News and an AP subscriber—and one who you know has repeatedly raised concerns over the lack of objectivity by AP writers in the past—I am astonished at this biased, one-sided “fact check” on the 2016 film, distributed world-wide under the AP banner. And I need to strenuously object to AP devoting funds from subscribers like SRN to create and distribute such left-leaning diatribes.

Did I miss the AP “fact checking” of Michael Moore’s “Farenheit 9/11” or “Bowling for Columbine” documentaries? Was there a “fact checking” of Al Gore’s questionable global warming movie “An Inconvenient Truth”?

Additionally, your writer Beth Fouhy is now on Twitter (Beth Fouhy ‏@bfouhy ) telling people: I've gotten more hate mail and tweets for my fact check on 2016: Obama's America than any story I've written. http://hrld.us/PpjaIx

While we regret anyone sending “hate mail and tweets” to your writer—or anyone else for that matter—the fact is your AP writer is not the victim here. If there IS a victim, it is subscribers like SRN News who have subsidized without our permission the AP’s biased account of “2016: Obama’s America.”

We have addressed this on several of our talk shows already, but we also need some action within your organization itself.

As Thom Callahan is no longer at the helm, please share my concern with the top people at AP in both hands-on news as well as management. This is as bad—or worse—than bias issues we have raised in the past, and I ask for immediate attention to our concerns so that whatever led to this unacceptable “news item” will not be repeated going forward.

AP responded in a letter from Sally Buzbee, chief of their Washington Bureau:

Please assure Mr. Tradup that we do Fact Checks on a wide variety of statements and material from all sides of the political debate. We have very aggressively Fact Checked statements by President Obama and other Democrats, in addition to material and statements from Republicans.

I don’t know specifically if we did Fact Checks per se on the other documentaries from the past that he mentioned. But we certainly in many of those cases did look at those political documentaries factually to see if there were distortions and report on any distortions.

It’s worth noting here that the fact that the AP did not do fact checking on Michael Moore’s fabulously successful documentaries demonstrates the AP’s inherent bias. But Buzbee continued:

If something becomes a part of the political dialogue, we feel we need to look at it.

We also have a story coming this weekend that looks at what a phenomenon the film has become, how well it’s doing at the box office, etc.

On the twitter issue, I have spoken to the reporter and asked her to keep her tweets focused on things she is covering. I do think that tweet was somewhat inappropriate and I appreciate him drawing it to my attention. As I am sure he is aware, social media is an area where news organizations are feeling their way. AP has a strong set of guidelines that prohibit reporters from expressing opinion or being too edgy on social media. Ms. Fouhy did not strictly break those guidelines. But I agree that the tweet made me uncomfortable, and I have spoken to the reporter.

We always appreciate feedback. I personally strive pretty hard to ensure we are covering the issues of the day but also being entirely fair and objective and I’m happy to always get feedback.

AP isn’t going to change: just today they joined with the Huffington Post to report that Mitt Romney had told a flood victim in Louisiana just to call 211, and refused to report the entire conversation, which had the victim saying:

“He’s good, he’ll do the best for us, he has our best interests at heart. I thought he’d be more like a politician, but it was more understanding and caring. He was caring.”

Salem and Tradup should be commended for taking the fight to AP. And the AP ought to be ashamed of itself for running hit pieces on films they find politically distasteful while ignoring liberal films that richly deserve fact checking.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/09/01/Salem-knocks-AP-for-2016-fact-check

Liberal Media Takes Quote Completely Out of Context to Paint Romney as Out of Touch

Mitt Romney recently took a trip to Louisiana to assess hurricane and flood ravaged areas, and to draw attention to the situation, possibly stirring people and organizations to help those in need. During the course of his visit, Romney encountered a woman who had lost her home in the flooding. Jodie Chiarello, according to a joint report from the Huffington Post and Associated Press, gave this account of her conversation with Romney:

"He just told me to, um, there's assistance out there," Chiarello said of her conversation with Romney. "He said, go home and call 211." That's a public service number offered in many states.

Aside from some other comments on her own personal situation, and the flooding in the city itself, the report offered no other statements from Ms. Chiarello in regards to Mitt Romney. Every major liberal website has run with the piece, stating essentially that a victim of the flooding had approached Romney, and he coldly responded "go home and call 211". By the time the hacks over at Think Progress had gotten to this story, they had shortened the headline to "ROMNEY TO HOMELESS HURRICANE VICTIM: ‘GO HOME’"
But the quote has been taken grossly out of context, and the media reports have selectively edited some significantly positive comments from the very same woman.
ABC reported that Chiarello had told Romney that, "I lost everything". This time however, the account is vastly more detailed and Romney's response is far more helpful than the liberal media would like you to believe.

“He said that he was going to do the best that he could for us.” Chiarello, a Republican who declined to say who she was voting for, said she was pleased Romney visited to be “supportive.”

“He’s good, he’ll do the best for us, he has our best interests at heart,” she said of the candidate, adding that he was different than she’d expected.

“I thought he’d be more like a politician, but it was more understanding and caring,” she said. “He was caring.”

Romney told the women that FEMA could point them in the direction of shelters.

Not exactly a bad guy, eh? What's worse, the original reporting of these quotes from Chiarello by the Huffington Post casts some doubt over their accuracy.
If you take the Huffington Post/AP article at face value, you have the woman saying this complete statement:

"He just told me to, um, there's assistance out there. He said, go home and call 211."

On the other hand, this account from the BBC includes a completely different sentence following the first:

"He just told me to, um, there's assistance out there. He's good. He'll do the best for us, you know. He speaks to our best interests at heart."

How could both news outlets have such differing accounts?
Two possible scenarios.
One - If the BBC failed to report the "go home" statement as the second sentence, then that raises some questions of their own. But it would also mean the Huffington Post article excluded the positive statements immediately following.
Two - If the BBC quote is correct, but the "go home" statement came after the positive comments, then the Post article pulled the positive quotes from the middle of Chiarello's full statement, creating an NBC/Trayvon type of selective editing.
Then there's this account from Business Week - Chiarello was apparently so upset by Mitt Romney's advice, that she told Bloomberg News she thought he came across as "caring", and that she'd probably vote for him.
This is a distinct example of the media rushing to portray Romney as an uncaring, out of touch, cold-hearted politician who doesn't care about the little people.
Meanwhile, they've completely ignored coverage of President Obama who, in the midst of the flooding and devastation is so concerned about the people of Louisiana and their homes, that he took the time to release a video presentation of his recipes for home brewing beer.
Keep that laser-like focus on the American people, Mr. President. The media's got your back.


Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/rusty-weiss/2012/09/01/liberal-media-takes-quote-completely-out-context-paint-romney-out-touch#ixzz25McdUABt