The Associated Press is a popular source for the stories which show up in your local newspaper. AP stories can also set the tone and direction for coverage afforded by other outlets. A story which shows up (or doesn't) will produce millions of impressions across the US that day.
Bush (Jeb) in Spain
Just as a litmus test, observe how closely AP followed Govenor Jeb Bush's visit to Spain last January. Jeb is not a major figure -- outside Florida -- at this point, and it was a business trip, not some official US function. Yet the AP wire paid close attention to it, perhaps because:
Gov. Jeb Bush, on a business trip to Spain, made at least one big gaffe when he met with local businessmen: calling Spain a republic when it is a constitutional monarchy...
Wow! Quite an razor-sharp eye for detail! What amazingly good coverage of such a minor event. (I suspect many Americans might have made the same mistake. At a business meeting. But hey, good catch!)
It's a small gaffe that's meant to tell a larger story: Another Bush who doesn't even know the difference between a constitutional monarchy and a republic, and which term should be applied to Span. (What a maroon!)
Now, with this incident -- and the AP's level of attention to detail here -- in mind, let's look at how it's covered the current Presidential candidates as they've travelled around the US...
Kerry Visits Green Bay
On August 24th, John Kerry was scheduled to visit Green Bay. It was surely an important visit, as the AP did stories on the 23rd announcing Kerry would visit. Even the New York Times ran AP stories mentioning Kerry's intent to visit Green Bay. And just a week before, when the wife of running mate Edwards had visited the same area, the AP covered that as well.
Kerry's visit to Green Bay was indeed interesting. Seems he got up in front of a crowd of Green Bay Packers fans and, to their shock and dismay, called Lambeau Field, a name familiar to NFL fans around the country, "Lambert Field". Whoops!
Yet, note that despite all the pre-visit coverage, for some odd reason, AP completedly failed to cover the visit itself, and the gaffe which highlighted it. Very interesting.
In fact, I could only find one mainstream news source (CBS reporter Steve Chaggaris) which confirmed the event's existence, and even that story has now been pulled from online, replaced with another.
Steven F. Hayes at the Weekly Standard couldn't help but note the disparity:
Kerry's blunder is the kind of mistake that campaign reporters often use to demonstrate a larger point. (Remember George H.W. Bush and his inability to come up with the price of a gallon of milk? Or George W. Bush and his failure to name Pervez Musharraf as the president of Pakistan?) But Kerry's gaffe has gotten scant media attention. The newspapers and local television stations in Wisconsin have given him a pass. So has the national press corps.
As they largely did on Kerry's earlier, similar, blunder where he enthusiasticly announced he was a huge fan of "Buckeye Football" before a crowd of dismayed Michigan fans, for whom the Ohio Buckeyes are a rival.
Bush in West Allis
The blogs have taken note, and are now paying closer attention.
In West Allis Wisconsin, after receiving news that President Clinton was having surgery, the AP reported that the crowd of gathered Republicans "booed", and conscripted the President in this meanheartedness by saying "Bush did nothing to stop them." This storyline was, in fact, a complete fabrication, and the opposite of what actually transpired. (The crowd spontaneously cheered when Bush said they all wished Clinton well and would pray for him.)
Bloggers like Powerline (based in Minnesota) noted the deception, and documented the story as it spread around the nation ("The Associated Press Makes It Up"), often receiving prominence and scandalous-sounding headlines. (Again, compare to the coverage of the last story mentioned above.)
When the AP was informed, they first removed the lines, then later re-inserted something similar, ammending the story to claim there were "oohs", perhaps to imply a typo. (I finally listened to a tape of the rally, myself, and heard no "oohs"; others had the same comment.) After getting some high-level blog attention (some blogs have around 100,000 visitors a day), the AP finally issued a retraction days later admitting the story was untrue.
The retraction didn't spread at all.
More Examples
Yesterday, bloggers caught several more examples.
One Kerry rally was held at a public park in Ohio. By coincidence, a Catholic pro-life rally was scheduled at the same park, on the same day. There were 500 protesting students, besides whoever attended the rally, which was similarly open to the public. Check out the local press:
According to the Herald Star (local press), "The crowd, estimated by officials as 3,500 strong, was almost split in half with people for and against the Massachusetts senator."
Yet, according to the AP:
Several dozen Bush supporters greeted Kerry in Steubenville with signs favoring a second Bush term and opposing the Catholic Kerry's support for abortion rights.
About 1,700 against, including 500 protestors, is rendered as "several dozen".
Falsely Discrediting Schwartzenegger
An important recent theme for Kerry has been that the Republican convention was full of "deception", a claim echoed by many top DNC spokesmen, and which seems to renonate in many media outlets.
Perhaps following this lead, another AP reporter recently attacked Arnold's speech there, implying he had lied when he mentioned seeing Soviet tanks when he was growing up in Austria, since there were none in the region he lived. But Arnold had clearly stated in the speech that he saw them "when we had to cross into the Soviet sector". The widely-carried AP article is inexplicably wrong, and just reading Arnold's speech is enough to show it.
Consider, for example, this derivative article, based on the AP original, spread worldwide by UK's Ananova, here echoed from Pakistan:
Historians blast Arnie’s speech
Arnold Schwarzenegger has told to go back to school after his speech supporting President Bush’s election campaign. Austrian historians say the Californian governor made some schoolboy howlers in talking about his homeland...
This makes a bad, false impression worldwide, even though the "howlers" belonged to the reporter, not Governor Schwartzenegger.
This is work more appropriate to the opposing Kerry campaign, not the supposedly neutral AP newswire.
Although other bloggers picked up on this first, Powerline again has the most comprehensive write-up I was able to find, also documenting AP was wrong when it denigrated Arnold's depiction of his home country, at the time, as "socialist".
Conclusion
We might argue none of these stories alone is a "huge" deal. But we're only looking at a few days' coverage from one source; things add up over time, impression adding to impression.
People look to their newspapers (or their web sites) to find out what's going on. When a reader sees top Democrats saying the Republican convention was "deceptive" and then reads an AP story which falsely reports what was said there were lies, it makes an impression.
When Kerry makes football-related blunders and the story is completely buried, (unlike the field day the press had with similar incidents with conservative politicians), again this has an impact on people's perceptions.
When Kerry is booed (at a few points, but generally respectful) at one of his own campaign stops, and local press outlets estimate half the crowd -- this is, over a thousand -- were in opposition, and all we read about are "several dozen" who opposed him, again, that again produces a very different impression.
Meanwhile, Bush has a rally, nobody boos, yet readers are told of the whole crowd booing President Clinton -- a complete fabrication which makes headlines -- again giving false but convincing support to Kerry's and other Democrats' contention that Republicans are "angry" and hateful. This makes another strong national impression.
If not intentional, this is an amazingly fortuitous string of coincidences.
Update 9/9: The AP alters the meaning of Cheney's quote by taking it out of context. (h/t Powerline, again)