The Associated Press issued a memo this week telling it's reporters and editors to avoid using the phrase "Ground Zero Mosque" in stories. The AP has decided the phrase is partisan and inaccurate, since it is used primarily by opponents of the mosque, and since the mosque is to be built two blocks away from the actual World Trade Center site.
Never mind that the mosque will be close enough to Ground Zero that the site on which it is to be built was hit by the landing gear from one of the 9/11 planes. Never mind that in a city as sprawling as New York, two blocks from something does not necessitate a name change based on geographical accuracy. This is about political correctness and what I have observed over the years to be a strong aversion within the AP to looking like it sympathizes with any right wing cause.
More than any other press organization, the Associated Press can be thought of as the spinal cord for the American media, AP stories are published in some 1,700 newspapers and 5,000 television and radio stations in the United States. CBN News is an AP member. AP is one of the pillars of American journalism in that it can set the tone for the national news coverage of any issue or event.
On it's website, AP says it delivers "unbiased news." That not true. A lot of AP copy is unbiased. There's little opportunity to inject liberal bias into a plane crash story. But you see it throughout their political and social issue coverage. There are whole websites devoted to AP's liberal bias. It's usually subtle, but finds a way to peek out behind the facade of objectivity. This so-called AP "FACT CHECK" of the Ground Zero Mosque is a not so thinly disguised defense of the mosque project and the spread of Islam in America. And go to the bottom of the piece where the writer essentially defends Saudi Arabia's religious bigotry toward Christianity and Judaism. That's bizarre. And as an example of AP's reach, that very piece was reprinted here, as it will be on countless websites all over the country.
If we really care about stopping left wing media bias that dresses itself up as "objectivity", the AP is a huge, almost insurmountable boulder in the middle of the road.