More Accountability Journalism

Weekly Example of Media Bias   —   Posted on November 25, 2009

An Associated Press dispatch, written by Erica Werner and Richard Alonso-Zaldivar, compares the House and Senate ObamaCare bills. We’d like to compare this dispatch to the AP’s dispatch earlier this week “fact checking” Sarah Palin’s new book. Here goes:

Number of AP reporters assigned to story:

• ObamaCare bills: 2
• Palin book: 11

Number of pages in document being covered:

• ObamaCare bills: 4,064
• Palin book: 432

Number of pages per AP reporter:

• ObamaCare bill: 2,032
• Palin book: 39.3

On a per-page basis, that is, the AP devoted 52 times as much manpower to the memoir of a former Republican officeholder as to a piece of legislation that will cost trillions of dollars and an untold number of lives. That’s what they call accountability journalism.

Read the original post at OpinionJournal.com.

Read an analysis of the AP’s fact-checking report on Palin’s book at the Columbia Journalism Review website.