Editorializing in a News Report

Weekly Example of Media Bias   —   Posted on March 16, 2011

“After years of claiming presidential immunity to avoid legal proceedings, [Former French President] Jacques Chirac is finally facing a court,” the Associated Press’s Jamey Keaten reports. That sentence could have done without the “finally,” which strikes us as a bit of anti-Chirac editorializing. But the second paragraph is much worse:

The former president, a bugaboo for George W. Bush during his rush to war in Iraq, on Monday becomes France’s first former head of state to go on trial since its Nazi-era leader was exiled.

“Rush to war” is unmistakably anti-Bush, but calling Chirac a “bugaboo”–an imagined or exaggerated object of fear–manages to insult Chirac as well, by suggesting that he was of little importance even when he was president of France.

Read the origianl post at opinionjournal.com. (scroll halfway down to “Accountability Journalism”)