AP managed to post an article analyzing the Presidential debate before said debate had a chance to happen. It’s like a Daily Show routine, only 15% less funny.
Annatopia has pics of the hastily withdrawn AP article.
Update: Democratic Underground has the text of the article here.
In comments, Tracy says this seems pretty inocuous and was probably just a webmonkey’s error. Well, yes…except the article is written in the past tense. “President Bush and challenger John Kerry got their chance to face each other directly Thursday night.” (The DU posting on the article points out several more sentences in the past tense.) The article was posted five hours before the debate began.
Why is this important? Because there are a lot of us who’d like to stop hearing about the So-Called Liberal Media (oft abbreviated SCLM), thank you very much.
Well, I went out and read the article screenshots. To me it reads like a preparatory article written ahead of time, and the actual content analyzing the debate was going to be added later. There isn’t anything in there about the actual content of the debate, just what people thought MIGHT be in it.
I think this was a webmonkey error. Somebody posted the unfinished article by mistake!
Well, of course it’s in past tense. Tracy’s right; this is clearly prep work, posted by accident. I’m sort of surprised that with all the shenanigans going on in both campaigns, THIS is the thing people are getting bent about. It’s going to be a long month.
Like what Tracy said, I bet they do a lot of pre-writing, framing out a story–of course you’d do it in the past tense–and have it ready for new info to go in.
But it does show a slant. And how often do such articles miss a focus on the important and unique content of a speech or event because the article already had other content that was covered in the pre-written piece? Sloppy and lazy is what it is.
What about this story about the Fox writer’s “joke”:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_09_26.php#003555
(Huh–the preview of my comments didn’t leave paragraph breaks. Am I supposed to know a HTML line for this? I don’t.)