In a report this morning  on the situation off the coast on Somalia, Associated Press reporters Elizabeth A. Kennedy and Paul Jelinek seemed oddly sympathetic to the cause of the terrorists in training the world insists on calling "pirates," almost to the point of grudging admiration.

Check out some of the words the AP pair used in their 9:15 a.m. dispatch (saved at host for fair use and discussion purposes, and for future reference if or when the text changes) following the "breaking news alert" at the link:

Undeterred Somali pirates hijack 4 more ships

Undeterred by U.S. and French hostage rescues that killed five bandits, Somali pirates brazenly hijacked three more ships in the Gulf of Aden, the waterway at the center of the world's fight against piracy.

..... The latest trophy for the pirates was the M.V. Irene E.M., a Greek-managed bulk carrier sailing from the Middle East to South Asia, said Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur.

The Irene was attacked and seized in the middle of the night Tuesday - a rare tactic for the pirates.

Wow. These brave "pirates" are "undeterred." They'll change tactics if they have to. And their reward for acting so "brazenly" is yet another "trophy."

Trophy?!?

It would appear that the reporters' desire to make America and the free world look weak in the face of lawlessness is more important than the impact its expansion might have on real peoples' lives, the world economy, and their supposed best bud Barack Obama. Or maybe they're trying to send a signal to the White House that it's not going to get any journalistic backup if their guy continues to act like a real Commander-in-Chief instead of the Chief Kumbaya Orchestrator they expected.

The two AP reporters' work is of a piece with an item James Taranto at Best of the Web noted yesterday at Reuters (bold is mine):

So far, pirates have generally treated hostages well, sometimes roasting goat meat for them and even passing phones round so they can call loved ones. The worst violence reported has been the occasional beating and no hostages are known to have been killed by pirates.

Taranto incredulously asked, "So suffering an 'occasional beating' to be consistent with being treated 'well'?"

Not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe someone should ask Reuters writers Abdi Sheikh and Abdi Guled, if they have wives, how "well" they treat them.

Seriously, whose side are the world's reporters on?

Back to the AP pair - Perhaps, to advance the cause of investigative journalism, Kennedy and Jelinek should consider offering themselves up in a hostage exchange so they can experience first-hand what these "brazen" and "undeterred" thugs are capable of. No, I don't want them to really do this. But if they did, and in the somewhat unlikely event they actually survived intact, their reporting might actually improve.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

—Tom Blumer is president of a training and development company in Mason, Ohio, and is a contributing editor to NewsBusters