AP's Sept. 16 Solyndra Story, Part 1: Passing Off Weeks-Old News As Its Own Work
The public learned on September 3 from William McQuillen at Bloomberg (possibly earlier elsewhere) that now-bankrupt Soyndra's private investors restructured the company's finances in January by lending the company "$75 million." As a condition of doing so, they convinced the government to give the new loan senior status over all other creditors. Now taxpayers face a likely loss of hundreds of millions in Department of Energy loans, perhaps over $500 million.
On September 7, Peg Brickley at the Wall Street Journal clarified that the amount involved was $69 million, and identified the names of the lending entities involved (HT to American Thinker for both stories).
But if you haven't stayed with or are unfamiliar with the story and read the Associated Press report this evening by Matthew Daly and Jack Gillum, you would think that the wire service did all of the dirty work to learn these things (credit-hogging language in bold):
Story Continues Below Ad ↓Obama admin reworked Solyndra loan to favor donor
The Obama administration restructured a half-billion dollar federal loan to a troubled solar energy company in such a way that private investors - including a fundraiser for President Barack Obama - moved ahead of taxpayers for repayment in case of a default, government records show.
Administration officials defended the loan restructuring, saying that without an infusion of cash earlier this year, solar panel maker Solyndra Inc. would likely have faced immediate bankruptcy, putting more than 1,000 people out of work.
Even with the federal help, Solyndra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this month and laid off its 1,100 employees.
... the implosion of the company and revelations that the administration hurried Office of Management and Budget officials to finish their review of the loan in time for the September 2009 groundbreaking has become an embarrassment for Obama as he sells his new job-creation program around the country.
An Associated Press review of regulatory filings shows that Solyndra was hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars for years before the Obama administration signed off on the original $535 million loan guarantee in September 2009. The company eventually got $528 million.
... Under terms of the February loan restructuring, two private investors - Argonaut Ventures I LLC and Madrone Partners LP - stand to be repaid before the U.S. government if the solar company is liquidated. The two firms gave the company a total of $69 million in emergency loans. The loans are the only portion of their investments that have repayment priority above the U.S. government.
... The AP review also found that officials at Solyndra had been seeking a second round of loans from the Energy Department to expand the company's Silicon Valley headquarters. The request for a second loan was denied.
The news of the company's second-round attempt was carried at L.A Observed on September 15 (HT Flopping Aces). Daly and Gillum did the Obama administration a huge undeserved favor by failing to tell readers that Solyndra wanted another $469 million (that's not a typo) in Round 2 -- and yes, that is a mark against Team Obama, because the company wouldn't have bothered to apply if it didn't think it had a chance of getting approved.
Readers should also take issue with the AP pair's characterization of the Solyndra saga as an administration "embarrassment." Sorry folks; given the campaign contributions, White House visits, and lobbying involved, this has all the characteristics of a sc-, sc-, sc- ... scandal.
Nowhere in the AP report does anyone who has done the digging during the past two weeks while the Essential Global News Network hoped the story would go away get any credit.
Here is what the AP's "Statement of News Values and Principles" says about giving credit:
An AP staffer who reports and writes a story must use original content, language and phrasing. We do not plagiarize, meaning that we do not take the work of others and pass it off as our own.
Also, the AP often has the right to use material from its members and subscribers; we sometimes take the work of newspapers, broadcasters and other outlets, rewrite it and transmit it without credit.
They'll argue that they're in a gray area, but when you're nine days to two weeks behind everybody else, I would suggest that going to the regulatory files others have already combed through and making it appear as if you're the first to have discovered what you're reporting -- as indicated in the bolded phrases and statements in the excerpt above -- deliberately misleads readers, listeners and viewers of AP content into believing that the wire service did the heavy lifting. Shame on Daly, Gillum, and AP for failing to give any credit where credit is due, thereby in my view perpetrating a clear deception.
Part 2 (found here) will look at the AP report's deceiving description of campaign contributions by Solyndra's private investors.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
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Comments
AP
Submitted by Indie Dude on Sat, 09/17/2011 - 12:47am.
The 2nd fraud to be found in "their" article.
A Bob Uecker moment
Submitted by CO2Maker on Sat, 09/17/2011 - 12:08pm.
Remember Bob's famous Miller Lite commercial when he says, "I must be on the front roooow"?
The O'Bama administration started that merry-go-round when they told the UAW and other unions that they can be on the front row of the bankruptcy proceedings — uh, coerced gummint buy-outs — of Chrysler and GM and kicked all the other primary creditors to the peanut gallery, where their share of the companies was peanuts.
Now the gummint supervisors *in the O'Bama administration* allowed Solyndra to subordinate the federal stake in the loan guarantees to private lenders, effectively reducing the prospects of being repaid to zero until after the private lenders got their money back. Good-bye, half a billion dollars.
AP propaganda for the 0bamites, with willing newspaper help
Submitted by Alfred J. Lemire on Sat, 09/17/2011 - 9:07pm.
Mr. Blumer must live somewhere outside the Washington and New York City metro areas, where the influence of the AP on public opinion does not get much notice. The administration is now mounting propaganda to get as many over-65 voters as possible to vote for Mr, 0bama and other Democrats in November of 2012 and maybe in state races this fall.
My local paper cut an AP story reporting the Solyndra bankruptcy to three opening paragraphs, stuck at the bottom of the business pages in a "Money Briefs" roundup. It splattered a nothingburger AP story on jets flying Al Qaeda biggies to jails across the top of Page One the same day. It ran a follow-up story Solyndra yesterday, also cut back, in the same ho-hum slot on the business pages.
And today, it ran a story that won't get any attention, on Medicare Advantage premiums supposedly dipping as enrollments increase. My local paper headed that, "A premium on politics/ Medicare Advantage savings undermine GOP claim." The intent was to whack at Republicans, who, in the mind of the lefty headline writer, played politics with the premiums. The story's third paragraph: "Republicans have accused Obama of undermining Medicare to finance his health care overhaul. Indeed, during this week’s GOP presidential debate, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann claimed the president 'stole' from Medicare to pay for his plan. "
You know what the writer, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar omitted. Also, as the beat writer, he surely knows of Mr. 0bama's opposition to Medicare Advantage. Mr. 0 has said, "We’ve got to eliminate programs that don’t work, and I’ll give you an example in the health care area. We are spending a lot of money subsidizing the insurance companies around something called Medicare Advantage, a program that gives them subsidies to accept Medicare recipients but doesn’t necessarily make people on Medicare healthier." I know a low-income man who gets Medicare Advantage and he has received care beyond and much better than what he would get with normal Medicare coverage: no matter to the 0bamites who don't like private business.
The article also did not properly explain what Medicare Advantage is and how it operates and it tilts in favor of the information's intended propaganda purpose, which info I question. You can read it at http://www.wwlp.com/dpp/health/healthy_living/medicare-advantage-premium...
My local paper cut the story's last paragraph: "Open enrollment season for Medicare Advantage starts Oct. 15 and lasts until Dec. 7."
It's unfortunate that the Media Research Center is so stuck on national TV and ignores what's going on in the news that most politically interested people get, in their local newspapers.