The Associated Press has made a conscious decision to use a more editorial based reporting style. I have previously advocated this king of reporting style as a solution to the problems of so-called "non-biased/objective" reporting that essentially acts as stenography, at best giving equal weighting to two sides regardless of factual accuracy and at worst acting essentially as press releases. I am re-thinking that position...

The ideal type of political reporting would print what politicians say and then attempt to analyze the accuracy of those statements - similar to what Jon Stewart does without the Dirty Sanchez jokes. The problem is that there are always enough facts out there to support a point of view and it is difficult to get anyone to try to sort through those facts objectively when they have a point of view. So the compromise solution is to still ask reporters to do that while identifying their political leanings so that the reader can take the information with a grain of salt.

The reporting i've seen recently from the AP has been horribly biased and now i see that is official policy, which makes a lot more sense. However, what i've seen has read more like political hit pieces, pro-candidate pieces, or fluff than editorial based reporting. This is the danger of this style: it is likely to devolve into pure punditry. For the AP, it seems to have happened rather quickly.

But I like the Dirty Sanchez jokes.