According to the Australian Associated Press website:
Australian Associated Press is the beating heart of Australian news. AAP is Australia’s only independent national newswire and has been delivering accurate, reliable and fast news content to the media industry, government and corporate sector for 85 years. We keep Australia informed.
The AAP was “accurate and reliable” when it came to a quote from London mayor Sadiq Khan. He supposedly said:
Terror attacks are ‘part and parcel of living in a big city’
The AAP took less than a month to correct an Australian user’s Facebook post, and to set the record straight:
The genesis of the Facebook post dates back to September 18, 2016 when London Mayor Sadiq Khan was quoted by London’s Evening Standard in response to an explosion in New York that injured 29 people.
In a video for a story headlined, “New York explosion: Sadiq Khan says terror attacks are ‘part and parcel of life in a big city’”, Mr Khan said: “Part and parcel of living in a great global city is you’ve got to be prepared for these things, you’ve got to be vigilant, you’ve got to support the police doing an incredibly hard job, you got to support the security services.”
Thank you for that service AAP. Conservatives and Trump supporters aren’t always accurate in their claims – and neither is the Establishment Left…
For example, the claim that Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people.” That claim was so grotesquely inaccurate that even some American factcheckers admitted that it “has inaccuracies.”
What about AAP? It uses the common leftist strategy of simply ignoring the claim, rather than debunking it. I searched for a factcheck for this claim on AAP’s website and came up empty.
I did a few other searches, and still got no results.
How convenient! A “trusted, accurate and reliable” factchecker only checks claims that will support its narrative when debunked.
I sent AAP an email:
Dear sirs,
I’ve seen it claimed, by very reputable news sources, that after the Charlottesville protest/riot Trump called the neo-Nazis “very fine people.”
Trump denied it, saying he wasn’t referring to the neo-Nazis in the group.
Could you please do a factcheck on this claim?
Thank you,
Reuben H
I’ll follow up if there’s any reply.
