AP Distorts Abramoff Numbers to Hurt GOP
By Shiner Posted in User Blogs — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
In a story by Pete Yost of the Associated Press, Lawmakers Hasten to Return Abramoff Gifts, Yost supplies some figures which give the reader an idea of which party was receiving the money:
Historically, tribal money had been going to Democrats almost exclusively. Abramoff changed that.The lobbyist ordered one tribal client to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations. A list, obtained by The Associated Press, earmarked $90,000 of the money for the Republican Party, none for Democrats.
Of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Abramoff directed the tribe to donate to congressional campaigns, the Republican-Democrat breakdown was 11-to-1.
Notice how he uses only one tribe as an illustration of what was going on, and that one tribe makes things look very lopside toward Republicans--indicating that they received 11 times more funds from Abramoff than the Democrats. However, if Yost has been following this story at all, he knows that this is not an accurate reflection of the distributions of Abramoff's gifts.
Check out this graphic from the Washington Post entitled How Abramoff Spread the Wealth. It shows that while Republicans recieved 63.7% of the gifts, Democrats received 35.1% of the gifts. And while the top recepient, Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) received $146,590 from Abramoff, the next highest recepient was Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) with $131,000. That's a big difference from 11-1 impression that Yost gave in his article, and despite these kinds of readily available facts, Yost does nothing to present balance in his article on his issue. He supplies only a single tribe's example and leaves it as representative of the entire affair--even though it is clearly a misrepresentation of the situation as a whole. Is that supposed to be fair and accurate reporting?
Why does Yost and the AP willfully present a misleading picture? Here's why:
he Abramoff case is the flip side to the House banking scandal of 14 years ago which hurt mostly Democrats, who long had been in control of Congress. Republicans have held majorities in both Houses for most of the past 11 years....It remains to be seen whether the Republicans' strategy from the early 1990s will work in reverse for Democrats in the Abramoff case.
Yost and the Associated Press are going to do their best to make sure history repeats itself--facts be damned.
I understand your point, although I think it gives Yost a little too much credit about his motivations.
If he was really just trying to correct Bush's inaccurate statement, why pull out an extreme example (11 to 1) instead of presenting the larger, more accurate picture of what happened (2 to 1)? Assuming he knows all the facts and wants to report accurately, why leave a misleading impression that the spread of the wealth was more lopsided than it really was? That's an important question. I don't see any reason why to use the one misleading example other than it was intentional, in order to make the GOP look worse off in this scandal than they actually are and to make the Dems look cleaner than they actualy are.
On the President's statement, I think whether the it was accurate or not depends on how you interpret Bush's claim that Abramoff was an "equal money dispenser". If you interpret it as, "Abramoff was giving equal amounts of money to both parties," then Bush would clearly be wrong. If you interpret it in light of his next phrase, "that he was giving money to people in both political parties," then Bush's statement isn't inaccurate. It's correct, but it just doesn't give the whole picture, since while he gave money to both parties, he gave twice as much to Republicans.
But not 11 to 1. And that doesn't leave the Dems in the clear in the Abramoff story--as much as Yost wants to leave that impression.
So what we can conclude from your Diary is that Abramoff gave a lot more money to Republicans than Democrats, just not as much of a spread as Yost suggests.
Ok. I think I agree with that.
I would also note that possibly one reason why Yost used that single tribe example was to draw an obvious contrast between a quote from the President in the previous sentence of the article.
For whatever reason, you didn't include that quote in your comments above. The quote was:
This week, President Bush said it seemed to him that Abramoff "was an equal money dispenser, that he was giving money to people in both political parties."
The President, based on the numbers you've provided, is clearly inaccurate. Abramoff was not dispensing money equally (as your numbers show).
Perhaps that was the motivation for Yost using that single tribal example. That said, it would be inaccurate of Yost to suggest that the 11-1 spread of money to Republicans vs. Democrats was representative of all the money Abramoff doled out.