Are you all familiar with Associated Press 2.0 - Biased Edition? If not, let me bring you up to speed, via The Politico:

Is Fournier saving or destroying the AP?

In the stories the new boss is encouraging, first-person writing and emotive language are okay.

So is scrapping the stonefaced approach to journalism that accepts politicians’ statements at face value and offers equal treatment to all sides of an argument. Instead, reporters are encouraged to throw away the weasel words and call it like they see it when they think public officials have revealed themselves as phonies or flip-floppers.

As has already occurred:

Even absent his byline, his influence has been evident, as it is in the lead to reporter Liz Sidoti’s June 19 news analysis on the Democratic nominee’s decision to reverse course on public financing: “Barack Obama chose winning over his word.”

Note that no AP writer has written a story yet on any of the many McCain flip-flops and outright lies. I think we can see which way the new AP will lean. (It’s also important to note that Fournier and Karl Rove have a history too.)

I bring all this up because of an AP story I just read that I find quite a bit disturbing:

Baghdad family’s woes far from Obama spotlight

By BRIAN MURPHY, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD - There is a Baghdad that Sen. Barack Obama probably won’t see.

It’s places like the dirt strip that crosses under a highway and leads to a small home — and a couple and their six grown children seeking to move forward in a city where violence has eased but life for many remains mired in economic miseries and few opportunities.

Excuse me, Brian… but, did John McCain visit this “couple and their six grown children” on any of his trips to Iraq? …No? Then why aren’t you writing about him then?

“I want to believe that the future for Baghdad is now better, that we’ve turned a corner,” said Abdul-Karim Sami, a reed-thin 60-year-old who once hobnobbed with Baghdad’s elite as a tennis coach. “I truly want to believe that.”

Then he ticks off the family’s list of woes: food costs so high they have cut back on all but essentials; jobs so scarce his oldest son peddles trinkets on the street despite a university degree in economics; not enough money left over for a doctor visit or any emergency.

“I pray every day that nobody gets sick,” Sami said.

Brian, you may not be aware of this, but there are many Americans out there that are in the same shoes as Sami’s. Why not write about them? How president Bush put them in the position they’re in? How John McCain, (Bush-II), plans on continuing Bush’s policies that will help keep them there?

The family strongly backed last year’s U.S. troop “surge” that is now credited with halting much of the insurgency attacks and sectarian killings in and around the capital.

Obama, who criticized the reinforcements at the time, has lauded the military successes, but argues that sending 30,000 additional soldiers to Iraq pulled away focus from the widening battles against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan and border regions of Pakistan.

Sami also supports the idea of a slow pullback by U.S. forces — not the rapid withdrawal that Obama has suggested.

Mr. Murphy, that last blockquote proves you to be the hack that you are… and should be removed from any position where your kind of thinking can be copied to print for others to read.

Way to go, AP! America has lost again.