I swear, I thought this was an Onion piece when I first saw it.

TechCrunch:

Here is another great moment in A.P. history. In its quest to become the RIAA of the newspaper industry, the A.P.’s executives and lawyers are beginning to match their counterparts in the music industry for cluelessness. A country radio station in Tennessee, WTNQ-FM, received a cease-and-desist letter from an A.P. vice president of affiliate relations for posting videos from the A.P.’s official Youtube channel on its Website.

You cannot make this stuff up. Forget for a moment that WTNQ is itself an A.P. affiliate and that the A.P. shouldn’t be harassing its own members. Apparently, nobody told the A.P. executive that the august news organization even has a YouTube channel which the A.P. itself controls, and that someone at the A.P. decided that it is probably a good idea to turn on the video embedding function on so that its videos can spread virally across the Web, along with the ads in the videos.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot wrap my brain around the logic of going after one of your own affiliates, even if you were unaware that they were embedding videos from your YouTube page. Isn't this why companies decide to become affiliates?

Way to go, AP.

The Associated Press, presumably looking to cash in on the phenomenal success of the "HOPE" artwork, are now going after artist Shepard Fairey, claiming he used an AP-licensed photo without permission for his iconic portrait.

USA Today:

As we've previously reported, the Hope posters that artist Shepard Fairey created during the presidential campaign use an image of Barack Obama that's based on a photograph taken for the Associated Press by then-freelancer Mannie Garcia.

Now, the AP wants credit and compensation.

The wire service says Fairey didn't get permission to do what he did. Fairey's attorney says "fair use" gave him the legal right to take the image and rework it into a piece of art.

"We have reached out to Mr. Fairey's attorney and are in discussions. We hope for an amicable solution," says the AP's director of media relations, Paul Colford, in a statement.

This may just turn into a landmark "fair use" case. Where do you stand?

See the images in question here.

MediaMatters' Eric Boehlert catches the AP in some serious hackery regarding the cost of President-elect Obama's inauguration celebration.

MM:

It's hard to find journalism more shoddy than this, courtesy of the AP's Matt Apuzzo [emphasis added]:

The price tag for President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration gala is expected to break records, with some estimates reaching as high as $150 million. Despite the bleak economy, however, Democrats who called on President George W. Bush to be frugal four years ago are issuing no such demands now that an inaugural weekend of rock concerts and star-studded parties has begun.

Where does that jaw-dropping number of $150 million come from? The AP never says. It doesn't quote anybody, it doesn't point to any facts. There's no nothing. The AP builds an entire story around how much Obama's inauguration might cost (why stop at $150 million?), yet never substantiates the what-if estimates.

As we said, journalism doesn't get much worse than that.

Nope, it really doesn't. The Villagers never get tired of the left-right false equivalency, huh?

Check out Eric's in-depth examination over the phony controversy.

Download | play    Download | play   (h/t Heather)

The AP is at it again.  The largest North American news service is continuing in their anti-Obama trajectory with an "analysis" that, like Ron Fournier's last week, seems more agenda-driven than actual analysis.   This time, it's Charles Babington, a little known writer from the Washington Post (and I've been assured it's not a nom de plume of Fournier) whose shots at Obama had MSNBC host Keith Olbermann wondering what speech Babington had been watching

I feel impelled to read something from the Associated Press, which is a service that is distributed to thousands of newspapers around the continent mostly, our continent. This is called ‘Convention Analysis'. I'm not familiar with the writer, he's identified as Charles Babington. But let me read part of this in full:

Barack Obama, whose campaign theme is "change we can believe in," promised Thursday to "spell out exactly what that change would mean."

But instead of dwelling on specifics, he laced the crowning speech of his long campaign with the type of rhetorical flourishes that Republicans mock and the attacks on John McCain that Democrats cheer. The country saw a candidate confident in his existing campaign formula: tie McCain tightly to President Bush, and remind voters why they are unhappy with the incumbent.

"Of course," he went on to write, "no candidate can outline every initiative in a 35-minute speech - especially one that also must inspire voters." Mr. Babington got the length of the speech wrong by at least seven minutes. And this is analysis that will be printed in many, many newspapers, hundreds of them around the country. It is analysis that strikes me as having done...as having borne no resemblance to the speech you and I just watched. None whatsoever. And for it to be distributed by the lone national news organization in terms of wire copy to newspapers around the country and websites, is a remarkable failure of that news organization.

Charles Babington, find new work.