Ahem:
Before Ron Fournier returned to The Associated Press in March 2007, the veteran political reporter had another professional suitor: John McCain’s presidential campaign.
In October 2006, the McCain team approached Fournier about joining the fledgling operation, according to a source with knowledge of the talks. In the months that followed, said a source, Fournier spoke about the job possibility with members of McCain’s inner circle, including political aides Mark Salter, John Weaver and Rick Davis.
Salter, who remains a top McCain adviser, said in an e-mail to Politico that Fournier was considered for “a senior advisory role” in communications.
“He did us the courtesy of considering the offer before politely declining it,” Salter said.
A reminder of Ron Fournier’s greatest hits can be found here at the Carpetbagger, but personally, this is my favorite:
Karl Rove exchanged e-mails about Pat Tillman with Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier, under the subject line “H-E-R-O.” In response to Mr. Fournier’s e-mail, Mr. Rove asked, “How does our country continue to produce men and women like this,” to which Mr. Fournier replied, “The Lord creates men and women like this all over the world. But only the great and free countries allow them to flourish. Keep up the fight.”
He would fit right in with the Rove proteges at the McCain campaign.
DougJ
I’m not normally one to go on about TEH BIAS, but this is genuinely troubling. Think about this: a guy writes gushing emails to Karl Rove, contemplates a job with McCain, then changes the policy of the AP’s political coverage from straight reporting to opinion writing which mostly attacks Obama.
How is that not problematic?
cay
It’s funny, because the Lord created Pat Tillman, the atheist.
TCG
Maybe Ron would be a good guy to screen the submissions to the GOP Video Platform submission page.
Man I bet the guy who screens these entries has a shitty job.
Danny Noonan
Um, yeah, but it seems Fournier IS working for McCain. The AP needs to kick this dbag out. He can go work for the hacks over at the Weekly Standard if he wants to pretend to still be a journalist. Otherwise, this bullshit shouldn’t fly for an organization like the AP.
Mike S
He has the best of both worlds. He works for McCain but gets a paycheck from AP. And if McCain wins he can then become the new Perino.
dorkboy
This is a clear example that most, if not all, “journalists” are no more than ex or soon-to-be political operatives. There are really few that I can think of that haven’t had, or ended up, with some sort of affiliation with a politician.
Tim Russert is a great example. Here’s a guy who went to school so that he could either be a lawyer or a politician. After he lands his gigs with Moynahan and Cuomo, he’s approached by the media to BECOME a journalist. What’s wrong with this picture? He had no training or interest in the subject before, yet this is who the media wants to hire. It’s why his only journalistic “talents” were the gotcha questions.
It’s getting harder and harder to find reliable, unbiased, sources of news.
here4tehbeer
At some point this week (Monday?) I would swear I head Steve Douchy on F&F say something like “as we’ve been reporting to you about the AP’s shift to the LEFT“.
WTF?
Matter. Meet Anti-Matter.
w vincentz
Pat Tillman (HERO). Good to know his remains are back from the taxidermist. I expect to see him greeting straight talkers (key robotic arm) at the entrance to the Straight Talk Express, and as a revered attraction in the lobby of a hotel in Minneapolis. Keep it going Pat!
This is a recording…this is a recording…this is a recording.
Nothing can go wrong…nothing can go wrong…nothing can go wrong…
Friendly fire?…friendly fire?…friendly fire…
OK…before any asshole reponds to this post, I’ll never make another dead Pat T snark…never…never…
nightjar
It’s not only problematic but appears to kick the Presses Constitutional role right in the nuts. It’s just one more example of the seditious crusade by the Bushites to republicanize the most important institutions we’ve relied on to be impartial towards nurturing our once vibrant and stable democracy. In this case it’s the private sector and the oldest and arguably most important news service in America. People think the worst damage done by the Bushies are things like the Iraq War, high gas prices, housing foreclosures, outsourcing jobs, etc… etc…
It’s not. The worst is undermining the rule of law, not only in the obvious items like torture, warrantless spying, a biased Justice Department, signing statements, unitary Executive and the whole litany of offenses against the constitution. But the real and long term damage is invisible to most of us. It is the systematic subterfuge and subversion of our government and sometimes private institutions. The obvious example is the Goodling case, but it extends to every agency and every department that has anything to do with regulating business. The foot soldiers like Goodling, and others think it’s about ideology, the conservative kind, with all the platitudes about small government and social policing, but what’s it’s really about is money, and removing any hindrance to worship of the God of Unlimited Profit.
This is why I originally supported Edwards as the only candidate willing and able to fight this disease. I think Obama will make a good president, but I am not hopeful he will have the political capital or will to take it on. Because the only way at this point is to systematically root out the malfeasance and make it THE priority to demand accountability and sunlight to the process of government. As for the press, the corporate wingnuts are only as brave as they think our prez and congress will let them get away with. End of rant.
DougJ
I agree with you, nightjar. I was an Edwards supporter too. Ultimately, though, I’m just happy that we weren’t stuck with Hillary.
nightjar
This is true.
cmorenc
Um…the “press” in the early days of the republic, from about the time of President John Adams right through the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln and even many years beyond that, WAS blatently partisan, with pamphleteers and papers strongly divided according to their preferences and allegiances. A main original purpose of the First Amendment, with respect to the press was to prevent the faction in power from attempting to outlaw or punish newspapers, journalists, and pamphleteers for publishing sharply partisan stories biased against them. The notion of a truly independent, objective professional press corps was something that only developed later on, as a byproduct of a substantial, influential segment of the public developing preferences for reading trustworthy, accurate accounts of things rather than simply stories that fit people’s prejudices and passions.
Noting this bit of history does NOT in any way support the notion that the AP showing much value for professional integrity or objective reporting by hiring this guy. However, it does place it into much more longstanding, well-established precedent in our nation’s press corps history. This is unfortunately, not any modern historical aberration, but rather a relapse into the dubious ways of earlier times.
Incertus
cmorenc,
The difference now, of course, is that the press tries to act as though it’s objective, and has indeed convinced a large part of the country that it is attempting to follow some unfollowable creed of objectivity. And so when the biases inevitably come out, the press loses credibility. Factor in 40 years of right-wingers “working the refs” as Alterman put it, claiming bias even where there wasn’t any, and now there’s nothing but a big fucking mess.
I think we’d be a lot better off if we had a system that was openly biased, and that didn’t pretend it wasn’t pushing an agenda. Objectivity is an impossible dream anyway–let’s just be honest with ourselves about it and move on.
DougJ
I think we’d be a lot better off if we had a system that was openly biased, and that didn’t pretend it wasn’t pushing an agenda.
I agree to some extent but the more I’m around reporters who report on actual things — taxes, construction projects, crime rates — as opposed to imaginary notions — Obama is presumptuous, Al Gore shouldn’t wear earth tones, etc. — the more I think that it isn’t that hard to do objective reporting about actual things. The trouble is that on tv and in the opinion pages, they spend half their time yapping about imaginary notions. I’m not sure there’s any cure for that except to make them stop. Bob Novak and James Carville screaming at each other about bullshit is probably better than Cokie Roberts and Tim Russert solemnly intoning about bullshit, but neither is very constructive.
rob!
“Dear Karl–
I wish I could Q-U-I-T you.
–Ron.”
Apsaras
Much like the “Scott McClellan confirms Fox reads off of Administration Talking Points” story, I get the feeling that I should be more outraged than I actually am. Ah, the audacity of cynicism.
Shhhhh!
null pointer exception
Well, you all are laughing now, but wait until those ‘active grannies’ vote for Jammaccain. Read the words of the greatest political mind of our time and weep you liberals!
cain
Dear Karl,
Why can’t we quit you?
cain
AnneLaurie
Part of the problem is that the trade of reporting has become the profession of journalism. In the fairly recent past, a reporter was a blue-collar worker, quite possibly unionized, who usually held a predictable suspicion of the pap, PR, and lies being disgorged by everyone s/he spoke to, especially those of Teh Better Classes. People got jobs as reporters by hanging around newsrooms, doing scutwork, trying to get the middle-manager editor to run the latest piece they’d freelanced. Today, all too often, journalism is a career for which the neophyte must acquire expensive degreed credentials. Perennial troublemakers like Mark Twain or Molly Ivins are no more welcome at the conference tables of such media elites than they would be at any similar meeting at Bain Capital or Trump Industries. The self-styled creme de la creme among our Media Village Idiots have much much much more in common with the equivalent careerists on Gucci Gulch and K Street than they do with us peons outside the Permanent Ruling Class. And part of the tragedy of this “upgrading” is that the Village Idiots themselves are completely blind to their own biases, because they’ve traded their vision for an HR upgrade.
Of course the ensuing vacuum in the social order has been filled by the new class of “political operatives” who hang around government offices and campaign headquarters, doing scutwork, hoping to have their latest brilliant blog-smear or cellphone catch uploaded to YouTube…
Mr. Tactful
Re: That shooting the other day.
Does this ring a bell:
“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
zuzu's petals
Apropos of nothing, I just discovered that my Torts professor is considered the “father of the intelligent design movement.”
Good God.
I had no idea. Of course this was in the ’80s, before his big book came out.
We mostly just thought of him as a meanspirited little jerk and okay teacher. In fact my mental nickname for him was “Hobbes” because he was nasty, brutish, and short.
Good God.
bago
So watching Generation Kill was hard, especially in episode 2 where they pass the track that had lost all of its transmission fuel. My brother drove that track, and had his eyebrows blown off because of an RPG hit to the driver’s quarters. They had to hold out for 14 hours without support while caring for the wounded caused by an A-10 strafing them twice while they were holding the north bridge of Nasiriyah.
Friendly fire isn’t. Any motherfucker who tries to cover up friendly fire incidents is a weasly cock sucking toad who cares more about the reputation of his boss than the disembodied organs of their countrymen spurting blood in the sand next to them.
Fuck them. Fuck them in their sandy vaginas.
gypsy howell
Instead of wishing and hoping that our infotainment media was objective and had our best interests in mind, we’d be better off just accepting them for what they are — propaganda organs of the rich and powerful corporate interests which now rule our country.
They are the enemy.
Treat them as such.
Punchy
Good luck with that. I wouldn’t be able to just let that go. I’d be in his office daily, peppering him questions about antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the role of random mutations in speciation.
harlana pepper
I remember a story about an American questioning a Russian (before the wall came down) about Communist propaganda. The Russian replied that the only difference between Communist propaganda and American propaganda was that the majority of Russians *already understood* that’s all it was: propaganda.
Notorious P.A.T.
Prove it.
Notorious P.A.T.
A law professor the “father” of the ID movement. . . that makes sense.
Andrew
I don’t understand this shit at a more fundamental level: Why are grown men acting like tweener girls with a crush on the Jonas Brothers?
Gregory
Because it’s attacking Democrats. Duh.
Zuzu's Petals
I should have been more clear. He was my Torts prof when I was in school in the ’80s.
I see that he has retired from teaching now, so I guess I could pigeonhole him if I ever cared enough to attend an alumni weekend and he happened to be there.
John Yoo is of course current on the faculty, which is an upset in itself. To say the least.
Tax Analyst
BTW, Ronald Brownstein, who writes Political Op-Ed and Analyis columns for the L.A. Times is married to Eileen McMenamin, a member of John McCain’s staff. At one point in 2007 he actually left the Times due to possible conflicts of interest. Apparently now that McCain is the Republican nominee Brownstein no longer recognizes any conflict.