Sunday, June 25, 2006

AP/Reuters Watch 6/25

A Flares feature which takes the Associated Press declaration in its STATEMENT OF NEWS VALUES AND PRINCIPLES: "we abhor inaccuracies, carelessness, bias or distortions" to heart and offers a helping hand by pointing out egregious examples of abhorrent practice as they occur.

Day after day after day.

Examples found by readers and posted in comments will be placed in the main post with credit. All Flares contributors are invited to edit and/or update AP/Reuters Watch posts.

NOTE: Stories at AP and Reuters are updated throughout the day. Some of their updates may obviate criticism made here.
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Fanning Immigration Flames - Stephen Ohelemacher writes a piece of statistical gibberish in order to make a claim in his lede that:
The U.S. population is on target to hit 300 million this fall and it's a good bet the milestone baby - or immigrant - will be Hispanic.
Nothing like some phony numbers to fire up the nativists. His assertion that
:...Latinos - immigrants and those born in this country - are driving the population growth, accounting for almost half the increase last year, more than any other ethnic or racial group.
is not sourced - and with good reason. There is no way to back it up with believeable numbers unless a fictitious count of entering illegal aliens is used. He also uses the locution of "immigrant" which has a connotation of legality to account for illegals.

The actual composition of the net increase of 2.7M in US population this year will include about 870K Hispanics - about 32%. The numbers are easy to ascertain - unless you're a propagandist pushing a particular point. (NOTE: of the 4.2M babies born in the US this year about 500K will be of Hispanic descent)

All Propaganda - all the time.
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3 comments:

Unknown said...

Rick:

As John Adams said, facts are stubborn things. I livein Indiana and I was shocked to find out that according to the US census, about 85% of the population is white. To hear the talk show people tell it we are an endangered species.

MeaninglessHotAir said...

Facts may be stubborn, but the fact is that we seldom check the facts. In reality we usually base our thinking on other people's statement of the facts. How many folks will check the AP statement's facts? How many will check Rick's? It's too time- and energy-consuming to check all the facts all the time, so most of us run a narrative in our minds based on other people's narratives of the facts. When the propaganda is loud enough and long enough we start to get a completely different view of what constitutes "the facts" and hence of what constitutes the world.

That in a nutshell is the source of most, if not all, political disagreement.

buddy larsen said...

I guess AP's leftwardness is being overcome by its geo/ethnocentricity. Whatever happened to the Left being the party dedicated to giving the little guy a leg-up?