Connect The Dots

Apparently Ron Fournier has been shaking up the AP, trying to get its reporters to put on a rhetorical leather jacket, to pepper their factual stories with cutting language and tell-it-like-it-is panache. Unfortunately, because reporters have been drilled to not have opinions (and most of them don't), they're using this directive to parrot right-wing spin and fuck up wire service stories. I don't want to tar all journalists here, but having worked in newsrooms, there's a lot of laziness, as they've come to rely on their fax blasts and the sweet nothings their sources tell them. When Fournier says "have a mind of your own!" the problem is they don't, so all it does is give them carte blanche to more directly play out their tired, rigid narratives, only now from the perch of news instead of opinion.

As for Fournier, when he exhorted his charges to tell it like it is, he must have meant this:

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."

Never mind it though, because he's very sorry about it. That's OK, because it gave us all the context we needed.

(Incidentally, that above quote came from a House Oversight Committee report on the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch cases, which was an object lesson on how the Bush Administration handles controversy - apparently nobody remembers anything about these events, owing to as the executive summary puts it "a universal lack of recall." Another in a long line of convenient memory losses.