Michael Biesecker

Shortly after the Parkland, Florida high school massacre, the Associated Press and New York Daily News treated the fact that the NRA had given $10,000 in non-cash assistance to the school's Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps, of which Nikolas Cruz had been a member, as some kind of scandal. Now, buried deep in a Friday Florida Sun Sentinel story, we learn that JROTC's leaders "banned Cruz…

As of late Sunday afternoon, the Associated Press's coverage of potential contamination resulting from Hurricane Irma in Florida, certainly a legitimate issue, was remarkably measured. That dispatch's tone starkly contrasted with how the AP, without genuine basis, went after the U.S. EPA after Hurricane Harvey in Texas, and how childishly it reacted when the EPA pushed back hard against the wire…

On Wednesday, an early Associated Press report following the confirmations of two of Donald Trump's cabinet nominees employed extraordinarily strident and bitter language, portraying Republican Senate Committee which approved those nominations as de facto bullies who were "unilaterally" imposing their will. An evening revision updating that afternoon report expanded that portrayal to include…

Never let it be said that the folks at the Associated Press aren't on top of the news, making sure that readers as well as subscribers who use AP copy in their radio and TV broadcasts learn the most important developments of the day. That's sarcasm, folks. Friday evening, in a story primarily about the FBI's grant of immunity to longtime Hillary Clinton assistant Cheryl Mills, the AP's Michael…

If you're a couple of reporters at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, it's one thing to be personally disappointed and even upset at yesterday's move by the Supreme Court to grant a stay to states challenging the "Clean Power Plan" regulation issued by the Obama administration's Environmental Protection Agency last October. It's quite another thing to falsely portray what…

Several outlets have looked over the Facebook posts of Craig Hicks, who was indicted Monday for the February 10 murders of three Muslims in North Carolina. Hicks's alleged murderous motivation appears to have had nothing directly to do with religion, but instead is said to have involved "a dispute over parking spaces at the condo community where Hicks and two of the victims lived." Whether we…

In the annals of fawning coverage of scandal-plagued Democrats, Michael Biesecker's Saturday morning report on John Edwards's illness and its effect on his upcoming trail on campaign finance violations surely must be among the worst. Biesecker missed at least a half-dozen natural opportunities to tag Edwards as a Democrat, finally doing so in cryptic fashion in his 15th of 17 paragraphs. He…