Loaded Words and Lopsided Choices

From The AP:

Dems won't find enacting 9/11 ideas easy

....Yet, with Democrats eyeing the 2008 presidential election and eager to show they're strong on security issues, analysts say there are no still-lingering proposals that can easily be enacted into law.

"I don't think there's a lot more there," said James Carafano, homeland security fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-oriented Washington think tank. "I think we're done."

If you're writing a story about Democrats and policy questions, you probably ought to find someone other than a Heritage Foundation fellow to address it. There's nothing wrong with quoting the Heritage Foundation but where's the response, or perhaps even the first take, from a Democrat or a liberal or other think tank?

That's even before we get to the lovely word choice "harping."

Continuing:

The commission in July 2004 made 41 sweeping recommendations to prevent another devastating terrorist attack.

A third of the recommendations urged tighter domestic security and improved emergency response. Another third called for reform of intelligence-gathering and congressional oversight. The rest involved foreign policy issues and nuclear nonproliferation.

A year and a half after issuing the recommendations, the commission reconvened and announced that many of its recommendations had not been adequately addressed.

Meeting almost a year ago, the panel's members handed out failing grades to the government, giving an "F," for example, to improving airline passenger screening and homeland security spending for cities considered most at risk of attack.

Democrats had been harping on many of the same issues.


Bad, bad word choice on "Harping" which dictionary.com defines this way:

To talk or write about to an excessive and tedious degree; dwell on.

Word choices matter. And the AP needs to be more careful. This shouldn't have made it past a copy desk empowered to demand balance in reporting.