That was the title on the story when I copied it into our system yesterday morning.  I see the AP has since switched it.  But the party being disingenuous here is the AP, not us.


A little bit later, he wrote me again:


I found proof: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/blog/2006/09/the_aps_switcheroo.html

Tom wrote a blog post this morning (referenced in the above link) explaining what happened.  After posting my original email to him, he wrote the following:


The emailer is right that if you look at the AP headline now, it reads "Poll Shows GOP Not Making Its Case:"

Since I was the one who published the AP story yesterday and was 100% sure that I copied the original headline at the time (between 6:30 and 7:30am), I did a little investigating.

First, you can see pretty clearly that the original headline, "GOP Gains Ground In Battle For Congress," was written based off of the copy in paragraphs six and seven:

Seven weeks before congressional elections, the poll of 1,501 adults conducted Monday through Wednesday showed that the GOP offensive has helped Republicans gain some ground.

Bush's public support has increased — 40 percent of likely voters approve of his job performance — and Republicans have erased an advantage Democrats had last month on the measure of which party would best protect the country. Voters now view Republicans and Democrats as equally capable.

As it turns out, a Google search this morning turned up at least one major media outlet still carrying the original headline:

So, sometime between roughly 6:30 am and 10:26 am the Associated Press switched the header on the story about its own poll results from being pro-GOP to something decidedly more negative.


I read the CBS copy, and the Yahoo copy, of the AP piece myself, and they are identical other than their titles.  I've never known Real Clear to alter the meaning of a title like this.  So it would appear that Tom is correct: either the AP, or Yahoo, amended the title of the article after the original publication so that it made the GOP look worse. 

This is the kind of media bias liberals hate to discover, because it fits into an inaccurate storyline that conservatives have been pushing for almost half a century—that the mainstream media is utterly corrupted by a liberal bias.  This storyline neglects to explain the incredible success of the conservative movement over the past half-century—this, in spite of liberals' apparent control over all centralized mediums of conveying information to the public. 

It also conveniently ignores the real bias inherent in mainstream media—its conglomerated, corporate, increasingly monopolistic structure, which is far more interested in appeasing the bankrollers of the Republican Party than its supposed liberal minders.

So that's why examples like the AP "switcheroo" piss me off.  Thanks a lot, Yahoo, or AP, or whoever decided to get cute with that headline.  If you thought you were helping, you were dead wrong.  And sincere thanks to Tom Bevan for honestly and thoroughly investigating the issue, even though who turned out to be the culprit was not my original suspect.