Sat Aug 02, 2008 at 10:43:56 AM PDT
In the recent statement by Obama about offshore drilling, there has apparently been selective editing taking place at the AP to delete this paragraph.
Here’s an earlier release which contains the whole Obama quote.
Later versions of this AP piece leave out this paragraph, and ‘news outlets’ like the NYT are not quoting this paragraph.
"Like all compromises, it also includes steps that I haven’t always supported," Obama conceded. "I remain skeptical that new offshore drilling will bring down gas prices in the short-term or significantly reduce our oil dependence in the long-term, though I do welcome the establishment of a process that will allow us to make future drilling decisions based on science and fact."
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Is the corporate media, specifically the Associated Press deliberately editing out sections of quotes to create a narrative, or not?
Using the Google news aggregator, one can use sections of the Obama quote and a relative idea as to the number of hits where the quote shows up. It numbers around 1600 hits.
Here’s the important part: while the news aggregator shows there’s a hit for the phrase, the phrase does not exist in most of the articles.
I spent about 10 minutes comparing hits from the aggregator to the actual text reported in the article.
It appears that the quote paragraph has been edited out.
Perhaps, my methodology is incorrect and I’m missing something, but it looks likes an AP story has been edited.
If I am correct, this leads to a whole series of questions.
Why was this paragraph deleted from the later versions of the distributed story from the AP, and what was the logic behind removing it, and who made the decision to cut it out.
Where is the journalistic integrity that one would expect from the New York Times, in reporting the whole story? Is space so precious that they feel it’s needed to advertise the latest in lingerie rather than reality?
If someone can show that my analysis is incorrect, I will pull down the diary; but after checking 3 times now, using slightly different sections of the paragraph it really does look like a hack job has been done to squash Obama’s full statement from the narrative.
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additional: methodology here
"welcome the establishment of a process that will allow us to make future drilling decisions based on science and fact" - straight Google inquiry reveals 9 exact matches [must have full quotes to get exact matches].
A Google news agreggator search with the same phrase reveals 5 hits.
Yet, the AP did have this originally reported 18 hours ago as a direct quote from Obama’s response. It appears that the corporate media is doing everything it can to steamroll a narrative upon the American public.
What the hell can we do about it?
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