AP Bias on Display Again – Mea Culpa Time?

The AP’s headline should read that 54 out of 59 water treatment plants in Iraq meet or exceed strict water standards, but it doesn’t. Michelle Malkin posted a full review of the story – Bias alert: The Cheney/KBR-deranged Associated Press spins a DoD report on water quality in Iraq – and unlike the AP story written by Larry Margasak, she took the 20 minutes required to read the 30-something page report. Read her full post, it goes into a lot of good detail, plus reveals this part of the report that AP missed:

Although there was no way to determine whether water provided by the contractors and military water purification units caused disease, contractors and military units responsible for water operations must always ensure that water provided to the forces meets all established standards and is safe to use.

The AP didn’t even bother to link to the actual report, instead they linked to the U.S. Central Command Web site and KBR Inc., a contractor in Iraq that maintained three of the five plants that had water quality issues. Again, there are 59 total plants!

KBR Inc. used to be owned by Halliburton, previously managed by our vice president, Dick Cheney. Check out how AP starts the story.

AP: Water Makes US Troops in Iraq Sick
By LARRY MARGASAK – 2 days ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — Dozens of U.S. troops in Iraq fell sick at bases using “unmonitored and potentially unsafe” water supplied by the military and a contractor once owned by Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company, the Pentagon’s internal watchdog says.

Are you kidding me? Can they be that off their rocker? KBR or Haliburton are referenced 19 times in the article and there are only 22 paragraphs in the story!

They need to kill this story. It’s a non-event anyway, get this:

…Therefore, water suppliers exposed U.S. forces to unmonitored and potentially unsafe water. However, the military medical databases for reportable illness and diseases showed only 26 disease non-battle injury cases among the 137,000 average monthly U.S. forces in Iraq.

Media bias on display at the Associated Press.

Posted in

Steve McGough

Steve's a part-time conservative blogger. Steve grew up in Connecticut and has lived in Washington, D.C. and the Bahamas. He resides in Connecticut, where he’s comfortable six months of the year.

The website's content and articles were migrated to a new framework in October 2023. You may see [shortcodes in brackets] that do not make any sense. Please ignore that stuff. We may fix it at some point, but we do not have the time now.

You'll also note comments migrated over may have misplaced question marks and missing spaces. All comments were migrated, but trackbacks may not show.

The site is not broken.