The Politico reports on the efforts of Ron Fournier, head of The Associated Press’s Washington bureau, to encourage first-person writing and emotive language in AP’s wire copy.  Fournier cites the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina as inspiration:

A dispatch Fournier filed in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina began: “The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent’s identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn’t match the public’s view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast.”

Fournier cited the article in an essay titled “Accountability Journalism: Liberating reporters and the truth” he wrote for the June 1 issue of the AP’s internal newsletter, The Essentials, as an example of how to be “provocative without being partisan … truth-tellers without being editorial writers.”

The essay was preceded by an unsigned note declaring that “It’s AP’s goal this year (and henceforth) to make this accountability journalism a consistent theme in our coverage of public affairs, politics and government. We have unmatched resources and expertise in every state to report whether government officials are doing the job for which they were elected and keeping the promises they make.”

“Katrina was a good example of when the journalism community got it right, because it was staring us in the face,” Fournier, seated in the AP’s Washington bureau, told Politico.

“When George Bush stood up there and said that things were going fine in Katrina, I was able to write, ‘The president is wrong.’ That was pretty liberating. It was also a fact.”

Popular Mecahnics — hardly a bastion of the VRWC — would probably disagree that it was a fact, given the evidence how much government did right — and quickly — in Katrina’s aftermath.

Indeed as Brian Thevenot, a reporter at New Orleans’ Times-Picayune, would later write for the American Journalism Review about the story he co-reported, debunking the media coverage claiming that a mass of corpses had been stored in a freezer at the AstroSuperdome:

We hadn’t anticipated the massive shockwave of self-correction that story would send through the international media. The examination of myths of violence – and their confirmation by New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and then-Police Superintendent Eddie Compass – became the story for days on end, a moment of mass-scale media introspection that ultimately resulted in a healthy revision of history’s first draft.

The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post followed up with similar, well-researched efforts debunking myths and coming to essentially the same conclusion we had: While anarchy indeed reigned in the city, and subhuman conditions in the Dome and the Convention Center shocked the nation’s conscience, many if not most of the alarmist reports of violence were false, or at least could not be verified. Dozens of other newspapers and television outlets joined in, offering news and opinion pieces, many doggedly questioning what they and others had earlier reported.

Indeed, the debunking continued in follow-up stories everywhere, from the Washington Post and Reason magazine.  The Reason piece starts by debunking a story run by — you guessed it — the Associated Press.

Ron Fournier might benefit from the same type of introspection, but I suspect that introspection is on the same junkpile as objectivity at the AP’s DC Bureau these days.

Because of the truth-telling.

(h/t HotAir headlines, Memeorandum.)