TPM blogger Eric Kramer was recently kind enough to list the Associated Press board members in his reader post "Horrified by AP Bias."

Having tried and failed again today to contact an editor at the Associated Press bureau in Washington, D.C., I was eager to call an AP board member and ask a simple question: How can the public complain to the AP about a problematic story so that the story gets corrected in a timely manner?

I called AP Board member David Lord, president of Pioneer Newspapers, Inc. in Seattle, and asked him about that. Lord could not come up with a single method by which the public might alert an editor to the need for a timely correction.

Let me repeat: The AP literally has no mechanism in place — zilch,
zip, nada — to ensure it hears public complaints about its coverage in
a timely manner. In effect, the AP doesn't want to hear from you or me.

My conversation with Lord began by looking up Pioneer Newspapers through superpages.com. I reached Lord directly, and was surprised that he answered the phone without a secretary or receptionist screening my call. He just picked up and said "Hello."

After confirming I was speaking to Lord, I told him the purpose of my call was to inquire about bias in AP political coverage, which I noted was not that surprising given the apparent political leanings of the board.

(Note: The AP board includes many right-wingers such as News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch and the publishers of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and The Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, Ind. There are also moderate and liberal board members, big and small names such as Gannett's CEO; on balance the 21 board members listed in Eric's blog post are all about business.)

Lord expressed surprise that I thought the board was conservative. He thought of its politics as evenly split.

I went on to describe the problem, that whenever I attempted to call an editor at the AP who was responsible for a given story, I was almost never able to reach that editor to deliver my complaint. Usually, I was shunted into the AP's automated complaint line, there to have my protest die a long and miserable death until the story was old news and some intern decided to press "Play Messages."

He said the board never got involved in AP content, except when it was personal, like when the conservative media were running negative stories about an AP photographer held for two years on charges of being a terrorist. That's one time the board perked up and responded. Otherwise, no.

Well, how could the public speak with an editor or convey a complaint that could be heard swiftly, in time to run a correction or put a new writethru of the story on the wire?

We get it from all sides, Lord said. Conservatives have been hammering the AP as too liberal.

I told him I represented a group of bloggers at TPM who are concerned about media bias.

Great, he said. If I'm online, I can go the AP website and post comments about stories. Or I can append reader comments to the stories on my local media's web sites.

But I would have to post comments at all the sites that ran the story, I said. Besides, comments aren't the same as getting the story changed to better reflect the truth. Comments never carry the weight of the article itself.

Lord said I should call the local newspaper that ran the AP story and complain to the editor.

But wouldn't that, at best, result in a correction at the local level? How many other papers, radio stations, TV stations and web sites would still be running the wrong story? "How many people," I asked, "would be needed to catch all those local droplets, especially when it was AP that spilled the bucket?"

Lord said the editor would make the correction if necessary and send the correction to the AP, inquiring about the error. That would be sufficient pressure to get the AP's attention and get a correction issued.

That's what Lord said, before he politely excused himself from the call.

But Lord was wrong about local editors applying pressure to the AP. It just doesn't work that way with political stories written on the campaign trail. The local editor in Peoria has no idea what McCain or Obama said today. Most editors are on deadline or in meetings and won't take a call.

Hell, the only reason we ever know a local editor ran a false or misleading story is because it ran. By the time we see it in the morning paper, the story is at least a day old. It won't be revisited tomorrow, not in the vast majority of cases.

No, as far as I can tell, the AP has no ombudsmen. There is no certain way to reach an editor who cares. You are much more likely to run into arrogant people who can't wait to hang up on you or who pretend to take your message so they can deliver it when the editor gets back from vacation.

Lets recap: The largest news organization in th world, the Associated Press, has no way of letting you contact them to get a story universally corrected in time to make the next editions across the country and the planet. They think its important to disseminate news, but not necessarily accurate news. That or they never get it wrong enough for a mere citizen to point out their mistakes.

The Associated Press, like most news organizations, has no reader advocate, enjoys special First Amendment protections in exchange for serving the public good, make millions of dollars annually and yet... and yet... the AP is wholly unaccountable to the public it influences in the stories it sends to nearly every newspaper and media outlet across the country each and every day, year after year.

The AP is flying blind to the public, blind to the errors it doesn't don't catch internally, blind to its own biased coverage.

And they don't give a damn if you want them to get the story right.