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Comment by developer2 | Hacker News Reader

This world we live in... the Associated Press permeates through nearly all of the US's media. They are the same reason you can find newscasts about some random throwaway story being repeated word-for-word verbatim. When you have dozens of news anchors across the country reading the exact same words from a teleprompter to push a story, something is very very wrong.

I mean, it's nice that the NY Times specifies "By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS" at the top of the article, but why is it even considered acceptable for the NY Times to publish articles that don't originate from themselves?

Sigh.

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The Associated Press is a wire service [1] -- writing and distributing articles to other news papers is what it does:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_agency

In blog spammer terminology, the AP is a shallow content farm that subscribers can either copy verbatim or spin into new articles to avoid duplicate content filters, as long as they provide credit/backlinks.

Not exactly. The majority of local news organizations don't have the resources to investigate and report on all the events happening throughout the world and so the international wire services like AP and Reuters fill this gap. However, this means the majority of national/international stories being reported by the downstream local newspapers and media outlets throughout the nation/world come from just a few big upstream sources, like AP and Reuters. A criticism of this model is regardless of how impartial the content of the upstream stories may be, the wire services effectively select what stories get reported -- what gets attention vs what gets omitted -- out of the sea of millions of possible stories happening throughout the world each day. This puts them in position to control our window to the world -- to influence what we do and don't see -- what we're made aware of -- and thus they are in position to shape the world's perspective.

Thank you, you explained it better than I could put into words. It still baffles me that "wire services" is even a thing or considered acceptable. shrug

AP, and similar wire services, are what allow the news media to at least somewhat offset their losses in revenue. Using them to send their own people everywhere is meaningless without a plan how to double or triple revenue.

Wire services such as AP and Reuters have always been used heavily by papers (?!)

If anything they are used a little less now because there are more third party originating news services and syndication channel.

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