Associated Press Mission: “to advance the power of facts”
Today I read with loathing..”AP Fact Check: Trump seeds racial animus with Covid falsehood,” by Calvin Woodward and David Klepper. January 16, 2022. This “fact check” blithely ignores the AP mission and sorely needs fact checking itself.
It is a widespread problem and truly sad situation when one has to check the truthfulness and journalistic ethics of the “fact checkers”. And to make matters even more dire, this case involves the “fact checkers” of one of our premier news journals: the AP or Associated Press!
The Associated Press whose mission statement is “to advance the power of facts”, is one of our oldest and most venerated news organization. It was founded in 1846! AP hires more than three thousand employees and has revenue of half a billion dollars. Its writers all belong to the professional Newspaper Guild. I used to believe its mission statement…and trusted the AP as a valued and relatively fact based news source. But that was then.
It seems the pernicious “anti-journalism 101” endemic which has infected the so called “main stream press” has apparently also seeped into the offices of the AP at 200 Liberty Street in NYC.
The piece above, makes a serous charge against former President Trump…that he was race baiting or “seeding race animus” by claiming that New York State is distributing covid therapeutics based on race…and discriminating against whites in the process.
That fact needs no checking. What was the AP editor that passed on this story thinking? It’s true. New York State physicians, when attempting to prescribe scarce Covid therapeutics LIKE MONOCLONAL ANTIBODIES are required to indicate the RACE OF THE PATIENT when filling out a prescription for a sick patient. They are directed “ to consider race and ethnicity, and give preference to black, indigenous, and people of color”. That is not a claim made by former President Trump at his Arizona rally, but simply an actual quote from New York City’s Department of Health directives. (Heath Advisory #39).
The authors actually do provide facts—but twisted and tortured them into biased conclusions. Yes they do state that: New York does require the distribution of scarce covid therapeutics to be administered in a racially biased way to a favored race…as one of “several risk” factors. But any insertion of race as a factor means that for no reason other than skin color one person is offered a life saving therapeutic and the other is denied. That is a racist decision. Following the logic here, this means that my mother who is elderly, white and has diabetes, would be denied treatment in favor of an elderly black woman who is of the same age and comorbidity. That IS inserting race into making, perhaps life saving, medical decisions. I and all of us would want their respective physicians to make medical decisions with only the best practices and welfare of their patients in mind. No racial factor should ever come into play!
Then too, how can it be a “falsehood” for Trump to restate facts published by the NY Health Department? The problem here for our fact checkers is that this NY “medical” directive is so embarrassing to the far left progressives that it must somehow be suppressed and undermined as “misinformation”. It is sad to see the AP descend to such depths of politicization of “the facts”. Perhaps instead of attacking Trump, the fact checkers of AP should have examined those who actually authored the NY State Health Department directives. It seems they, rather than Trump are the culprits “seeding racial animus”.
Perhaps the fact checkers should have also checked the veracity of those in the Health Department who assured them that “ they do not use the race information to deny treatment”. Then why do they insist information on race? Why must a physician identify the in the race of a patient if that information is not going to be used, to permit or deny the filling of a life saving prescription?
These so called “health” directives are an insidious and very slippery slope into dangerous ugly racism.
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