I saw an Associated Press wire story on Sunday that was an especially egregious example of opinion masquerading as a news story. The headline was “Tea party bulling its way into 2012 GOP race.” Here’s how it began:
Bulling its way into 2012, the tea party is shaping the race for the GOP presidential nomination as candidates parrot the movement’s language and promote its agenda while jostling to win its favor.
As an editor, the words “bulling” and “parrot” jumped out pretty quickly as loaded words that I would have struck from the story. With the intention of writing a column about it after the Labor Day weekend, on Monday morning I went to the story link and found an entirely rewritten headline and first paragraph. That story was gone, and in its place was a story with a rewritten lede paragraph and a new headline, “Tea party forcefully shaping 2012 GOP race”:
The tea party is forcefully shaping the race for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination as candidates parrot the movement’s language and promote its agenda while jostling to win its favor.
Here’s a screen grab:
For a moment I thought I’d completely misremembered what I had read on Sunday. Did I just imagine the biased initial clause in that story? I Googled “bulling Associated Press 2012” and found that, indeed, my memory was accurate. I found the original version of the story on The Salt Lake Tribune’s website (screen grab below).
Here’s how it appeared in The News & Observer yesterday, the changed version:
The first version, absent the first five words, is a pretty straight news lede (I won’t quibble with “parrot,” though I find it annoying). “Bulling its way into 2012” adds nothing to the paragraph, except the reporter’s (or his editor’s) bias.