AP comes to Obama's rescue

"We've got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we are not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure there."

Sen. Barack Obama said it.

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No, it wasn't a harsh indictment of American foreign policy in Vietnam made during his college days.

It wasn't even tough rhetoric he employed to illustrate his contention that we are losing the war in Iraq.

This was Obama's view of what the U.S. military is doing today in Afghanistan.

You might think a major U.S. presidential candidate who made such an ill-advised statement for the entire world to hear would be drummed right out of the race.

You would be wrong.

One of the reasons he has survived the fallout from this gaffe is because the largest news-gathering agency in the world came to his defense.

"A check of the facts shows that Western forces have been killing civilians at a faster rate than the insurgents have been killing civilians," wrote AP staffer Nedra Pickler in what was released as a "fact check" article.

It continued: "The U.S. and NATO say they don't have civilian casualty figures, but the Associated Press has been keeping count based on figures from Afghan and international officials. Tracking civilian deaths is a difficult task because they often occur in remote and dangerous areas that are difficult to reach and verify."

The AP goes on to suggest al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists, whom the news agency euphemistically calls "militants," have killed 231 civilians in 2007, while Western forces have killed 286.

Talk about comparing apples and oranges!

Nowhere in Obama's shameful quote or in the context surrounding it did he compare the numbers of civilian deaths caused by Western forces and those inflicted by al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists. He was, in fact, making the point that more U.S. ground troops are needed to avoid the practice of deliberately targeting villages from the air.

So what, I have to ask, is the relevance of this so-called "fact check"? It has nothing to do with the point being made by Obama.

If there were any validity to Obama's assertion that the U.S. was deliberately "air-raiding villages" with the intent of killing civilians, doesn't it stand to reason there would be more than 286 civilian deaths in 2007? If the U.S. policy objective were to maximize the civilian death toll, I would have to conclude it is not a model of efficiency.

Remember, we attacked the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan because they cooperated in a one-day air raid on the U.S. that killed nearly 3,000 civilians!

I was shocked when I heard Obama utter these words. I shouldn't have been, knowing his woeful inexperience in politics generally and in foreign affairs specifically.

What was more shocking to me as a newsman of 30 years experience was the quick excuse-making and rationalizations offered by the world's largest news-gathering agency, the one that feeds information to thousands of newspapers, websites, radio stations and, thus, has more influence than the New York Times, CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS combined.

But, then again, I shouldn't be shocked by that kind of irresponsibility by the AP, either.

After all, in my new book, "Stop the Presses! The Inside Story of the New Media Revolution," I do something no other media veteran has ever done – chronicle in some detail the growing and largely undetected and unreported bias of the AP.

When the largest news-gathering organization in the world makes up "facts" to save one of its favored presidential candidates from criticism, you know we still have some huge institutional problems in the media.

Order Farah's new book, "Stop the Presses: The Inside Story of the New Media Revolution"