The Associated Press is like oxygen. You don’t even notice it’s there — until it’s not.
The AP has been around since 1846, two years before Wisconsin became a state. It’s a wire service, which is a bit of an anachronism these days. But basically it means that newspapers subscribe to the service and then they print the AP stories provided by reporters scattered throughout the world. That makes the AP kind of invisible because most readers, understandably, just read the story and don’t worry much about the byline.
But the AP is an incredibly powerful thing. It has reporters in over 230 locations around the world and in 93 countries. It has reporters in all 50 states and in every statehouse.
And here’s the main thing: the AP practices objective journalism. It adheres to the idea that objectivity is a goal worth striving for and that there is such a thing as objective reality. One of the things that has most contributed to the public’s loss of trust in journalism is the awful notion that reporters can’t get beyond their own biases and so shouldn’t even try. That view has never taken hold at the AP.
It even provides the standards — or at least one set of widely followed standards — by which the news is reported and written. We here at YSDA try to follow the AP Style Guide. We try. We find the rules regarding capitalization befuddling. Or is it that we find the Rules regarding Capitalization befuddling? And we go along with the AP guidance to capitalize Black when we don’t capitalize white. This makes no sense to us, but it’s a measure of our respect for the AP that we do it anyway.
And here’s the thing. The AP has now achieved another level of respect: it has come under attack from the convicted felon Donald Trump. (The YSDA Style Guide calls for Trump’s name to always be preceded by “the convicted felon” at first mention.) The AP has been banished from Trump’s press entourage for the crime of not using “Gulf of America” when writing about the Gulf of Mexico simply because Trump has deemed it so.
Good for the AP! So we should support them. They’re a nonprofit corporation. You can do what I’ve done and support them with a few bucks here. It will support good journalism and put a little stick in the eye of the convicted felon at the same time.
YSDA stands for:
Free speech.
The rule of law.
Reason.
Tolerance.
Pluralism.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
Yes! Love that the AP never stopped calling Mt. McKinley by that name…oh wait.
X is the media now whether you like it or not.
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I don’t like it.
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Always good to directly support those who we deem worthy of our support.
As to objective striving, I would place AP as solidly Left. They might have been able to make the objective claim 30 years or so ago. As many other outlets, they have been sliding, along with their guide, into PC land for awhile.
Here’s a chart that pairs them up with their stable mates and compares them to other outlets on the L-R spectrum. It seems about right to me:
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart
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Boy, that chart is way off. It has the Wall Street Journal as centrist and it has NPR to the right of AP.
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I would also put NPR in the same column as the AP. The WSJ centrist column is for their news reporting. I probably would put that one in the leaning right column also, though they follow the mainstream fairly closely now.
For the overall grouping in the Left column, I find it very accurate. AP defines PC, making it an overlord there, seeping into almost all the other outlets.
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Boy, I find myself pretty sensitive to the PC stuff — I see it clearly at NPR — but I read AP stories every day and I’m just not seeing it
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I’d argue this website has a better take on the AP (and other outlets in general). They rate the AP as center-left bias, with High factuality and credibility ratings: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/associated-press/
As Dave has pointed out, that link you provided seems very fishy. Real Clear Politics is centrist? Maybe 10 years ago. They’ve been veering right for a long time with a clear bias in the right-wing bent of many of their articles. Media Bias scores them appropriately as Lean Right in my opinion: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/real-clear-politics/
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This is all in the eye of the beholder and pretty subjective. But IN RELATION TO EACH OTHER, I’d have to go with NPR as very left, the New York Times as left, AP as center-left and the Wall Street Journal (reporting, of course, not editorials) as center-right.
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AP PC is as simple as Black and white 🙂
For a bit more, Matt Taibbi posted a graphic comparing the style guide from 25 years ago with the current version:
If you have access to the guide, Taibbi suggested looking at the list of terms to avoid using.
The full article is here, behind a paywall:
https://www.racket.news/p/trump-is-trolling-the-ap?publication_id=1042&post_id=157460157&isFreemail=false&r=1pgvzm&triedRedirect=true
Here’s a quote from the article:
“The AP was praised last year for booting juvenile or minor because the terms can be “dehumanizing.” It instead added strictures to “consider terms like child, teenagers, youths [and] young teens.” I’m not sure how a reporter covers court cases where technical terms like minor or juvenile are at issue if he or she is bound by editors to describe the young person who just shot another young person as a “child.” Likewise they’re to avoid terms like inmate or prisoner in favor of descriptions like a man who is incarcerated in an Alabama prison is appealing his sentence.”
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Well, okay, I’m not wild about this kind of thing either. But just as a daily reader of AP stories I find them to be pretty well balanced, PC styling aside.
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