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10/26/2010
Not okay, neither the misuse nor the AP's blind eye
For years, the American Family Association's One News Now site has been repurposing Associated Press wire stories, with their own images, fear quotes, replacement words (most prominently, "homosexual" for "gay"), and other edits that fall outside the guidelines of the AP Stylebook injected into the copy:
Compare the above to an actual AP wire story:
Yet despite multiple attempts to make the Associated Press care about this by both this site and by GLAAD, nothing seems to have been done. The AFA continues to do this sort of thing on an almost daily basis, changing the entire meaning, context, and intent of AP stories so that outdated terms are made to seem like an acceptable journalistic practice here in America of 2010, and pink White House graphics are made to seem like perfectly kosher choices that any AP photo editor would routinely make.
We don't know what else to do. But we do know that the AP's blind eye on this is unfair to the national discourse, to its own stable of writers and editors, to its brand, and to LGBT people who are sick of seeing their lives presented as alleged. We'd care, if we were America's most prominent news wire.