Associated Press chairman: 'Obama bin Laden'

I actualy feel sorry for Dean Singleton.

The chairman of the Associated Press was standing next to Barack Obama at an AP luncheon on Monday and asking him a question about Afghanistan when he suffered the ultimate (for 2008) slip of the tongue.

You can tell from the video that the guy was greatly embarrassed.

Obama was good-natured about it, though it was probably irritating.

Singleton said: “You said you want to reduce the number of troops in Iraq, can you imagine shifting a substantial number to Afghanistan where the Taliban has been gaining strength and Obama bin Laden is still at large?”

Obama replied after hearing laughter from the crowd.

“I think that was Osama bin Laden,” he said.

After more laughter from the crowd, Singleton said, “If I did that, I’m so sorry.”

Obama laughed and then said: “No, no, this is part of the exercise I have been going through over the last 15 months, which is why it’s pretty impressive I’m still standing here.”

Link

•  Probably won't be the last time either

  by quaoar on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:00:20 AM PDT

  •  Earlier at the same venue McCain...

    received a gift of doughnuts with sprinkles.

    Doughnuts for McCain. Another "Osama" confusion/smear for Obama.

    The two images crystallize what we can expect from our corporatist Fourth Estate from now until the election.

    But the corporatist media can't (yet) control the blogosphere, YouTube, or Obama's remarkable grassroots financing. Even with the Establishment stacked against him, Obama still has a chance.

    by FMArouet on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:52:31 AM PDT

•  Thing is,

  it really is a pretty easy mistake to make.

  During WWII, Churchill insisted that "Iceland" be written as "Iceland(C)" to distinguish it from "Ireland."

  by SadTexan on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:02:51 AM PDT

  •  Silly comparison

    It's a ridiculous "mistake" - otherwise known as a Freudian slip.

    Also, listen to the B.S. question about "imagining" force deployments - the guy didn't even need to bring up bin Laden.

    by HeavyJ on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:17:34 AM PDT

    •  Knowing Singleton history, only mistake was...

      his saying it in public.

      No one makes that kind of "mistake" in public unless he's used to making that same comment in private.

      Especially someone who owns the huge chunk of the U.S. media that he owns.

      
      

      by skywriter on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 12:37:04 PM PDT

•  We know two things from this video

  1.) Singleton was nervous and didn't mean to do it.
  2.) Obama was pissed.

  by Ivey476 on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:03:13 AM PDT

  •  I agree...this was one fuck-up he did not need.

    by David Kroning on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:07:14 AM PDT

    •  I'm sure he was pissed about Johm McCain

      getting the white glove treatment.

      by Shhs on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:20:23 AM PDT

•  Damn

  He's just so charming! How can you not love the guy?

  by jenontheshore on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:03:14 AM PDT

•  Pretty typical of the accuracy you can expect

  from the AP....horseshoe reporting..you don't throw a ringer everytime, just important to be close.

  by muledriver on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:06:19 AM PDT

•  It was clearly an accident...the same cannot...

  be said about John Ashcroft.

  by David Kroning on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:06:23 AM PDT

•  The AP (ASSHOLES PARADE)

  Making Up Tainted News. Their Job As Usual!

  by DFutureIsNow on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:06:47 AM PDT

  •  Ummmm, a suggestion...

    try the decaf

    by Bouwerie Boy on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:09:22 AM PDT

  •  You may have issues with individual writers...

    ...Please don't extend it to all of the Associated Press where there are thousands of honest and dedicated reporters, editors and photographers.

    Some AP reporters and photographers, in fact, due an outstanding job.

    by skywriter on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:13:31 AM PDT

    •  Do you work for that agency as an editor?

      by David Kroning on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:16:27 AM PDT

      •  No

        But as a former longtime daily news person, I know BS when I see it. I continue as a writer and editor but not for a news outlet.

        by skywriter on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:18:10 AM PDT

•  The AP CHAIRMAN?

  NPR didn't mention that.

  Christ, this is the outfit that employs Nedra Pickler.

  I like that Obama smacked the little weasel, though.

  by HeavyJ on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:10:15 AM PDT

  •  I don't think was malicious

    It was a slip of the tongue embedded in a long question about Osama bin Laden.

    Does it have deeper Freudian implications? I don't think so.

    And the guy made sure to apologize right away. If any thing it was a good moment for Obama.

    by WaveFunction on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:24:03 AM PDT

•  Billy Dean Singleton is a bastard

  He's hated by reporters and editors for buying up newspapers and closing them, leaving everyone out of work (Ft. Worth and Houston), of union-busting, and of buying major shares in nearly everyone of the Bay Area newspapers and turning them into garbage.

  Singleton deserves no sympathy. He is a greedy, union-busting bastard, and a stupid m-f'er too.

  I wish AP had not given him a new seat on its board. And I seriously doubt he's the chair, as the headline in this diary states.

  
  

  by skywriter on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:11:21 AM PDT

  •  Correction: he is the chair

    Then his comment is even worse. He is and always has been a stupid son of a bitch, along with being a rat-fucking union buster. His take-over of Bay Area newspapers brought him that seat on AP and its chairmanship.

    God Help the AP

    by skywriter on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:16:49 AM PDT

  •  You might try clicking on the link

    which is from an ASNE blog, before you diss my headline.

    Or you might have gone to the trouble of maybe even checking Wikipedia:

    Link

    But I guess it's easier to just trash someone rather than take a second to look something up.

    by quaoar on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:18:46 AM PDT

    •  Who is billy Dean Singleton?

      http://www.laobserved.com/...

      Nieman Reports The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at
      Harvard University Double Issue Vol. 53 No. 4 Winter 1999 Vol. 54
      No. 1 Spring 2000

          Spring 1996

      Feasting on the Seed Corn

      Media critic says that newspaper executives cutting into news
      coverage are risking the future for short-term gains.

      By Alex S. Jones

      The question for the nation's newspapers is as stark as it is
      simple: Will they survive?

      ...

      In the rare places where there is genuine rivalry between
      newspapers, the impact on news budgets is the exact opposite of
      the current trend.

      A wonderfully telling example is the case of The Denver Post,
      which is owned by William Dean Singleton, one of the most profit-
      minded and cost-conscious publishers in the nation.

      Dean Singleton's Denver Post is in a fierce news battle with the
      Rocky Mountain News, flagship of the Scripps Howard chain. Over
      the past year, the Rocky laid off 17 managers and demoted some
      others, but publicly boasted that no downsizing had occurred in
      the news department. The Post, meanwhile, expanded its news
      budget as though Singleton took pride in making a lush news
      operation his signature.

      Nothing could be further from the truth. In September, Dean
      Singleton acquired The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield,
      Massachusetts, one of the most distinguished small newspapers in
      the nation and one known for its oversized by industry
      standardsnews operation. Unfortunately, the paper's owners
      overextended in other non-newspaper areas. It was not their
      handsome news operation that forced them to sell, but when they
      got into financial trouble they cut the news staff to 40 from a
      high of 62. When Singleton bought the paper, he ordered news
      salaries cut and the news staff further reduced. An additional 11
      editorial employees left or were not offered jobs.

      The bulging newsroom in Denver and the decimated one in
      Pittsfield make the point. Newspapers will spend what they need
      to spend on news in order to protect their market position. It is
      good, common business sense. And when they don't have to worry
      about protecting their newsgathering dominance, they will apply a
      standard that makes 20-plus percent profit margins attainable.

      The potential catastrophe for the newspaper business is that the
      people who lead it have not yet realized that they are in the
      position of The Denver Post, not The Berkshire Eagle.

      ...

      Columbia Journalism Review - CJR

      November/December 2000 | Contents

      A LETTER FROM SILICON VALLEY

      BY MICHAEL S. MALONE

      ...Finally, just to make sure that the craziness stretched from one
      end of the Bay Area to the other, the Marin (County) Independent
      Journal, a fine regional paper, was bought by the cost-slashing
      Singleton Group (ANG Newspapers), already notorious for running
      the Oakland Tribune like an Indonesian Nike factory.
      ...

      April 4, 2001

      Newspaper Cuts Raise Concern About the Quality of Journalism

      By FELICITY BARRINGER
      ...

      Some chief executives at privately held companies, like Dean
      Singleton of the MediaNews Group, have been excoriated by
      journalists for cutting newsroom staffs and salaries to leverage
      the purchase of more newspapers.

      ...

      from the American Journalism Review
      Week of April 24 through 30, 2001

      Thomas Kunkel is dean of the Philip Merrill College of
      Journalism at the University of Maryland and president of
      American Journalism Review. Gene Roberts, longtime executive
      editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and former managing editor of
      the New York Times, is a professor of journalism at the college.
      Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering This
      article is excerpted from the book "Leaving Readers Behind: The
      Age of Corporate Journalism," which is being published this month
      by the University of Arkansas Press.

      By Thomas Kunkel and Gene Roberts From AJR, May 2001
      ...

      But you'd better get used to it, because the real momentum is
      just beginning. Indeed, should the consolidation of the
      newspaper industry continue at its current fevered pace, it won't
      be long before the nation effectively is reduced to half a dozen
      major print conglomerates. The flamboyant William Dean Singleton,
      CEO of MediaNews Group, one of the chains that has championed
      this new order, flatly predicts, "You will see a lot fewer
      newspaper companies in five years." No one has contradicted him.

      THIS IS NOT ANOTHER pointless lamentation on the Citicorping and
      Wal-Marting of America. All change has implications. Some are
      intended, some not; some are beneficial, some not. If it is
      regrettable that the corner five-and-dime and your neighborhood
      S&L have been driven out of business by the giants, it's also
      likely that at the end of the day you have more hardware
      selection and banking services at your disposal than ever
      before. News, however, is a different commodity.

      It is unique to any given place; what happens in Portland, Maine,
      is of little consequence in Portland, Oregon. But unlike other
      realms of business, in the newspaper industry, consolidation--in
      tandem with the chains' desperation to maintain unrealistic
      profit levels (most of these big companies now being publicly
      traded)-- is actually reducing the amount of real news being
      gathered and disseminated, most conspicuously at the local and
      state levels, where consumers need it most. This is because
      consolidation has resulted in far fewer news outlets, and the
      economic pressures have resulted in fewer reporters with fewer
      inches in the paper to say anything.

      Concentration has other ramifications, less easy to document but
      no less real. For starters, it too readily facilitates a kind of
      corporate group mind-set. Sometimes this is a good thing; in
      recent years, for instance, it has resulted in a doubling of
      sports coverage and a fourfold increase in space devoted to
      business. More often than not, however, notions turn into
      convictions with no supporting rationale. Years back the idea
      took hold in the industry that readers found coverage of
      government "boring," and that foreign news was hopelessly
      "irrelevant," even though empirical evidence shows both
      suggestions to be canards.

      Coverage of government at every level has since been in retreat--
      about which more in a moment--and foreign news is quietly
      disappearing from mainstream newspapers. Indeed, most of the
      nation's dailies--perhaps 95 percent-- practice journalistic
      isolationism.

      They devote twice the space to comics as they do to international
      news. They take the weather almost as seriously as momentous
      events from abroad. This new media environment also fosters a
      kind of creepy coziness, where activity that once would have been
      dismissed as preposterous is now commonplace. Times Mirror can
      lend Dean Singleton $50 million to help MediaNews purchase the
      Los Angeles Daily News--hometown rival to TM's own L.A. Times--so
      that a stronger competitor won't.

      The publisher of Hearst's San Francisco Examiner promises to
      stem his paper's criticism of Mayor Willie Brown if Hizzoner
      doesn't oppose Hearst's takeover of the rival Chronicle. The
      entire business side of the L.A. Times can climb into bed with a
      major advertiser, the Staples Center, and no one in a leadership
      position appreciates its blatant impropriety. At a time when
      rank- and-file journalists are being held to higher standards of
      conduct than ever, what kind of screwy, hypocritical message
      does such activity convey?

      Meanwhile, budgetary strictures and multimedia demands leave
      newsrooms more sorely pressed than ever. Our favorite example--
      and maybe a poster child for the beleaguered journalistic
      fraternity--is the police reporter for the paper in tiny
      Cumberland, Maryland, where the staff was stretched so thin that
      he had to have the local police fax him the day's crime reports--
      the ones they wanted him to see, of course, as opposed to the
      ones he might really need to see.

      This sort of thing isn't as uncommon as one might suppose. In
      other words, what's happening in the newspaper world is more
      than inside baseball, of interest only to journalists and Wall
      Street analysts. It has a cost to average Americans that grows
      increasingly clear. And that cost, in the form of diluted and
      less serious, less substantive news, could be high for a nation
      whose democracy literally depends on an informed citizenry.
      ...

      Editor and Publisher by by Mark Fitzgerald

      After 111 years, seven of them under the ownership of Texas
      native Singleton, the Houston Post folded unceremoniously April

      18. The 1,500 full- and part-time employees who reported to work

      that day were told to clear out their desks and leave.

      Posted October 10, 2002
      Too kind to Singleton
      From JONATHAN WEISMAN, Economics Writer, Washington Post: Regarding Dean Singleton... For five years, I slaved away at the Alameda Newspaper Group, a chain of Singleton papers in the East Bay of California. Though the newspapers were full of hard-working, dedicated reporters and editors, the management ran them with ruthless penury. I was in my 20s and perfectly content with an income in the 20s, that is, around $27,000 a year. But for the working stiffs on the shop floor, Singleton's management could only be described as cruel, especially in the astronomically priced Bay Area. Colleagues who dared to ask for raises were told to find new jobs if they wanted more money. But with the Bay Area journalism market locked up by the San Francisco Chronicle with its own labor strife, the soon-to-fold Examiner, and the hard-to-crack Mercury News, many co-workers simply lived in semi-poverty or left journalism altogether. I'd hate to think of the talent that was wasted.

      The papers themselves were reduced to cookie-cutter layouts, formulaic stories and infinitesmal news holes, all in the interest of turnkey journalism. If talent was not to be paid for, Singleton had to build newspapers that required no talent to be published. I made friends for life in the Singleton crucible, and gained experience that proved to be the cornerstone of my career. But I must say that the New York Times story on Dean Singleton was far too kind.

      www.poynter.org/medianews/letters.htm#singleton (no longer online)

      OCTOBER 29, 2002

      Newspaper Exec Pays Lip Service to Web; IHT Sale a 'Print Coup' Over Net?

      Mark Glaser
      2002-10-29

      www.ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1035914811.php

      'Bare-bones' guy ready for meat?

      The Associated Press Managing Editors (APME), meeting in Baltimore, must have been spewing up their cups of joe when William Dean Singleton addressed their gathering, telling them that "newsroom cutbacks have gone far enough in this industry. Maybe too far." Here's a guy who bought up 50-plus newspapers over the past couple decades, kicking out staffers or snuffing out operations completely, and now he's talking about beefing up content during a recession?
      ...

      There are hundreds more articles about this profit hungry enemy of news workers, the public, and the First Amendment.

      
      

      by skywriter on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 12:27:46 PM PDT

      •  The fact that Singleton is an ass

        has nothing to do with the headline you questioned.

        by quaoar on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 01:06:32 PM PDT

        •  I corrected that comment elsewhere in this thread

          My point is that Singleton would not have said that publicly if he had not already been saying it privately.

          This is not an attack on you, as your earlier comment suggests. It is an attack on Singleton. Monstrous difference.

          by skywriter on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 01:11:51 PM PDT

•  Obama handled that really well!

  He made a joke out of it and even got a compliment for how he handled it from FOX NEWS...SHOCKER!

  I felt sorry for the AP News guy.  He was embarrassed.

  by Drdemocrat on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:11:42 AM PDT

  •  What Timing!

    The way he stopped and pointedly drank water was fantastic!
    Yep! This is for sure the guy we want to send in for diplomatic talks with world leaders.
    He can make a point from 20 paces!

    by ZenTrainer on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 04:04:28 PM PDT

•  The poor man

  stumbled earlier in his question.  The second faux pas clearly was an accident.  His face was as red as his tie.  Obama exhibited his usual class, dignity, and humor.  I feel sorry for Singleton.  I doubt he'll live this down easily, or ever forget such an enormous slip of the tongue.  

  by RoCali on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:18:10 AM PDT

  •  Feel nothing but contempt for Singleton

    Feel empathy for all of the news people he's spent his lifetime throwing out of work.

    by skywriter on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:19:36 AM PDT

•  AP's credibility now shot forever....

  Clearly this shows that the AP cannot be trusted. Will this derail their credibility? Was this the opening UPI was looking for? Does this lack of professionalism by the head cheese of AP show that they are elitist. Frankly, I don't feel like I can do shots with him or go hunting for snipes with the head of the AP....time to shut 'em down!

  The above message brought to you by a typical, latte drinking, bitter, lousy bowling progressive. Snark on...

  by Dillonfence on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:22:40 AM PDT

  •  I love you comment, best of the day! n/t

    by Shhs on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:26:39 AM PDT

  •  You should know UPI's history

    Then you would not say what you are saying.

    by skywriter on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:58:57 AM PDT

•  Simple slip of the tongue

  No one even noticed when he said McCain Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-Clinton.

  Oh wait...

  by djbender on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:54:10 AM PDT

•  The point of this video is that

  although it was a terrible "misstatement" whether it was intentional or not, OBAMA handled it perfectly and with grace.  The media headlines play this like it was an jab at him...After seeing the video it is apparent to me that the guy did make a mistake - although a stupid one - and it came off as a great moment for Obama...AGAIN, GRACE UNDER FIRE AND MAKING A BAD SITUATION INTO A ONE WITH A POINT...

  by Kyman on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:58:11 AM PDT