On the flip side, I worked as a reporter and the funniest "thank you" I got was from a speaker who wrote, "You got most of the quotes right." It was funny because I TAPED him and transcribed directly from the tapes. I also was in the habit of reading back my notes to people - which is what good newspaper reporters are SUPPOSED to do -so the subject could add or clarify what he or she said. (That, and everyone worth their salt knew that the two things you must NEVER mess up are obituaries and wedding announcements.)
The funniest thing that ever happened was with this fellow who had appeared at a public meeting over a land dispute with his neighbour. (I think it was the fence, but it might have been the duck pond. Land disputes are great stories.) He found out I was writing about it and railed at me, "I'm a private citizen!" I explained how public meetings were openly quoted. Then, to be fair, I read back what he had said. "That's not what I meant," he said. So he thought about it and gave me another version of the same thing. I read it back to him. He got a funny look on his face and said, "I really sound like an ass, don't I?"

I once played in a battle-of-the-bands reported on by a *very* major newspaper. My band had been in papers before, and we found that the bigger the paper, the less fact it contained. By the time we'd got to the top, the articles were almost entirely fact-free.
This turned out to be a good thing. Said very major paper quoted our guitarist making a flippant remark about his boss. He had never said anything like it, but fortunately, they got his name completely wrong. We decided not to bother complaining, though we did wonder what became of all the notes the reporter took.
When they say they're not biased, I think they mean that they get *everything* wrong.

slightly off topic - one of the things I enjoyed about the Harry Potter books is the way she has the media continuously distort the truth so it appears that the opposite is true. It's amusing in a scary kind of way.

My sisters formed a music group (called, of course, "The Beu Sisters"), and they are constantly misquoted, even when an electronic press kit it given to the interviewer or magazine or whomever.
One would think an EPK could just be copied and pasted into their article, so no errors happen. No such luck! Not only are there spelling errors and such, there are major factual errors.
Some of my favorite misquotes are:
1) that the oldest sister in the group is the oldest Beu in the family (meaning that I, her older brother, don't even exist)
2) my mother and father met while doing a show that my mother started rehearsing for just 2 weeks after having my oldest sister - meaning her and I are illegitimate
Gotta love the (mis)information age.

Tim, the only thing most of these people can quote accurately is silence.

I was interviewed for a newpaper article, once, and learned a lot from the experience. The interviewer thought that designing t-shirts must be a fascinating job, so she wanted me to tell her all about it (this was a long time ago).
In retrospect I should have declined the interview, because the reporter did not really want to hear what I had to say. She wanted my remarks to follow a template that she already had in mind for the story.
By the end of the interview, I don't think she liked me a lot. I had never done an interview before, and didn't "get it". I was just being honest and she was trying hard to do a nice piece of fluff for the local Sunday edition. We were at odds because I was telling her that, well, making t-shirts was fun sometimes, but it was basically just a job. I did say that - at it's best - it was really folk art.
The headline read "Artist Says His Work Is "Folk Art At It's Best".
I came off like an arrogant jerk.
She should have warned me ahead of time to just smile and tell her what she wanted to hear.

The article you linked to is not by the Associated Press (AP). It's by AFP, a company headquartered in France.
Thanks. I missed that. Problem fixed. (Insert obligatory remark about France.)

We have few reporters anymore. We now have a lot of "journalists". Reporters report the news. "Journalists" are out to change the world.

Admittedly, this isn't an AP story, but it isn't as if the AP is any different. At least here in my home town, journalists seem to be taught to be disingenuous.
I was interviewed for an article in the student run newspaper at the local university about street lights on campus. Street lights are a big deal in my town because of the number of observatories here. I explained how the light sensor on the street lights worked in my interview.
Before the story went to press, the paper's editor changed my quotes in the story to say the opposite of what I actually said because she thought street lights worked differently. I called up the paper's office to complain, and I was totally blown off. The tendency for dishonesty starts early.

Speaking of liberal media bias, there's an excellent website called The Media Research Center that's worth frequent visits. They document cases of liberal bias in the news. Check them out at www.mrc.org.

ordinarily i agree with you Jimmy. But..this isn't an AP story...

I remember a while back Peter Jennings led a big panel discussion* of news reporters (and other media types) on the question of liberal bias in the media.
The panel concluded that they weren't biased, and pinned the blame for the idea on radical right-wing media (in other words, the whole show was about how terrible Rush Limbaugh is).
So, since you accuse them of bias, Jimmy, YOU are obviously the problem.
*I can't remember if this was before or after Jennings daring documentary revealing that Jesus wasn't that great and that it was highly unlikely He rose from the dead.

Who do they think they're fooling?
well, the ever shrinking millions of morons who still think the MSM is a source for "news".

The MSM is editorializing instead of simply reporting facts? When did this happen?!? [/sarcasm]

"Who do they think they're fooling?"
Well, Cardinal Mahoney, for one. Of course, that's stretching the boundries of charity by assuming that he's NOT engaging in propagandistic grandstanding.
Maybe we should ask for clarification from his fan-club, The Tidings?