AP Manipulates Headline to Imply Bush Hypocrisy

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Paul Chesser at the American Spectator blog notes an inaccurate, and purposefully ironic, AP headline. The headline creates a phantom event that is found no where in the body of the piece.

There's an Associated Press story out on the wire with the mis-titled headline, "Bush: Democrats shouldn't be trusted to run Congress." Of course since it's the AP, it's running on many news Web sites and will run in hundreds of print newspapers in the next day or so, with near-identical variations of the headline. ABC's affiliate here in Raleigh even puts the "Democrats shouldn't be trusted" in quotation marks, as though the president had literally uttered that statement.

I bring this up only because nowhere in the article is President Bush quoted saying such a thing. Maybe he did, but it's not in the story. In a different political environment (that is, pre-Foley) that headline would have been perfectly acceptable, because in the article the president is in effect saying Democrats can't be trusted with national security. But now that Foley has been exposed and the heat is on Congress, that headline portrays the Republicans as (even more) hypocritical by calling Democrats untrustworthy.