A few years ago we bought KWNA-AM and FM in Winnemucca, Nevada.
They were and are two great radio stations in a great city where folks don’t have to worry about many of the idiotic things which their counterparts in more urban areas do. Most of the folks who live in Winnemucca, America have a clear-eyed view of reality and don’t expect anything from their neighbors except civility.
When we bought the station, we refused to assume the contract with the Associated Press.
Many people asked why.
In the July 6th Las Vegas Review Journal (and other newspapers around the nation) I found my definitive answer in a story about rainwater harvesting in Tucson, AZ.
Now let me say at the outset that harvesting rainwater for things like irrigation—especially in the desert—makes a lot of sense. And making commercial developers build such systems into their desert developments is probably NOT an unnecessary governmental intrusion.
I didn’t have any problem with that part of the story.
Here is the part which will add to the many reasons I will never again trust the AP as a news source:
Water supplies from the Colorado River are likely to diminish from effects of global warming and increasing demands from other states in the West. And groundwater is carefully managed to prevent overpumping the water that supplies the 1 million people who live in growing metropolitan Tucson. That makes conservation and rainwater harvesting all the more important.
Yep.
There it was, stated as fact. Water supplies from the Colorado River are likely to diminish from the effects of global warming.
The story was written by an Arthur Rotstein who, if my guess is correct, is a general assignment reporter at the AP. General Assignment reporters have no credentials, scientific or otherwise, in climatology. But many who work for the AP tend to have left of center political leanings.
When I was growing up in this business, wire services distributed THE NEWS.
THE NEWS did not include fanciful concepts such as global warming in NEWS STORIES.
This is the same AP which in 2002 called Muslim terrorists “devout” while it called Jewish victims “radical”. The same AP which refused to call terrorists terrorists.
But it is perfectly content to allow a general assignment reporter to make the blanket statement in a story that water supplies from the Colorado River are likely to shrink because of global warming.
(As an aside, I’d like Mr. Rotstein to explain what it was that causes the corner of Tropicana and Las Vegas Boulevard to have about 15,000 hotel rooms as opposed to the glacier which was formerly there.)
The folks at the AP were fairly insulted that I didn’t think it was worth $10,000 a year of my company’s money to pay for crap like this.
It used to be that when the end of the world was announced it came with five bells from a Model 19 teletype machine run by AP or UPI. You couldn’t miss it and you got it on the air immediately without question.
Today, not so much.
It used to be that we could depend on a wire service to make sure we got the news of the day from a clear-eyed, unbiased point of view.
Those days died after 9-11 when the AP became clearly left-wing in its ideological bent and thus became of little or no use to media outlets like mine.
My guess is that companies like News Corp and others with a vested interest and resources to do so will fill the gap that the AP will leave.
But it didn’t have to be that way.
Had the executives of the AP merely stuck to their job, they might not be complaining how hard it is to stay in business in the age of the internet.
FRED WEINBERG
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