Metaphorically speaking, I follow AP around to urinate wherever they
walk. I loathe AP. Well, that's too strong. I don't put any energy
into AP at all anymore, save what I'm expending here.
At the risk of boring you beyond tears, this is what happened: While
I was city editor of a small daily newspaper in western North
Carolina, the area suffered a minor earthquake, as I recall, about
4.7 on the Richter Scale. I was at my desk when it happened. It
sounded a lot like someone blew up the ammo dump south of town,
except there was no ammo dump south of town.
My maternal grandfather was a college professor (the real kind,
Andrew!), a geophysicist and an earthquake specialist. While I
majored in Anthropology, with emphasis in North American Archaeology,
I had enough hours for a minor in geology, save I never got around to
taking calculus. That said, I knew my earthquake stuff. My reporters,
with my ever so light and humble direction, made the proper calls,
talked to the right people, and within 30 minutes of the event we had
a complete and concise story filed with AP, which they dutifully put
on the wire.
We then went on to flesh out the story with some really good stuff I
got from a professor at the University of Memphis. The school
maintained a whole passel of seismographic reporting stations in the
Blue Ridge, and several graduate students and professors there had
done extensive research on the various underlying faults in the
southern Appalachians, some of them going all the way back to when
the African plate rode up over the North American plate about a
bazillion years ago. In the next day's edition, we had it all, A to
Z, front to back and back to front. There was no question our readers
could have asked that we had not answered.
All of which is to say, we had our sh*t nailed down. It was good. It
was correct. It was effing spot on.
So, when our neighboring newspaper to the north filed its earthquake
story with AP, a good hour or more after ours, the AP promptly dumped
our story for theirs. If you haven't guessed by now, theirs was a
mess, a load of filthy bilge, an abortion, if you will. The only
thing going for it was they had, in fact, spelled earthquake
correctly. They knew nothing about Memphis, the monitoring stations,
or the fact that the National Earthquake Information Center in
Colorado, which was their source, got its info from the Memphis sensors.
I made an inquiry with AP as to why they had trashed a correct story
for a bag of crap, and AP's response was they had just assumed that
because the other paper was larger, it also was more correct. I do
not exaggerate when I say the AP Bureau Chief did not speak to me for
some months afterwards, based on my stated (loudly) opinion of him
and his organization. I was not shy. I do believe my editor and my
publisher spoke to me afterwards about my revealed lack of diplomacy.
To make matters worse, after my call, AP took some of our stuff and
added it to our competitor's, making a complete mash of the freaking
story.
Did I mention I don't have a lot of respect for the AP?
--Bob Whitmire
Loathing the Associated Press for more years than he can count
www.bwp33.com
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