The Associated Press has, from time to time, been accused of biased reporting. Usually, these incidents appear well outside the hothouse of Virginia politics and are of only minor interest. But here’s one that strikes closer to home. In an article covering Gov. McDonnell’s signing of a bill requiring photo ID of voters, we get this whopper:
Republican majorities in the Virginia House and Senate pushed the bill to passage one year after a more modest GOP-sponsored voter identification law failed to prevent President Barack Obama from winning Virginia for the second presidential election in a row and a Democratic U.S. Senate victory.
Got that? Voter ID has always been about stopping a Democratic presidential candidate from carrying Virginia.
Naturally, this paragraph lit up both the comment section at the WJLA site and got some notice from Twitchy.
But out of charity, I will allow the possibility that the AP reporter — the Great and Powerful Bob Lewis — was merely taking his cues from that most level-headed of Democratic Senators, Mamie Locke, who was quoted in the story’s third paragraph as saying that Republicans need to cheat in order to win.
This is rich, coming from someone who, in a rare moment of candor, admitted she was not particularly effective as an elected official.
On second thought, no. I will not allow the possibility that Lewis was overwhelmed by Sen. Locke’s air-tight argument. He, and the layers and layers of editors above him, allowed this to hit the wires.
Which means all of them were doing little more than serving as Mamie’s steno pool for the day.
