One of these AP articles is not like the other….

Posted by PP at the SDWC

April 1, 2007

As I’m sitting back in Pierre tonight, trying to organize my MP3 collection, I caught some chatter on the fact that there’s two or three versions of an Associated Press article out there on the same topic. One appears to be presented in its entirety, and the other…. Well let’s just say its a bit watered down.

See if you can catch the difference. Here’s the first article which I mentioned a few days ago:

http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/16990498.htm

and the Argus Leader version of the same article? Well it’s not available on line at the Argus website at all. But what it does do is to edit out the harsh criticism that the people quoted in the article have for the three democratically appointed judges.

The Argus article stops with the paragraph

“An assistant U.S. attorney from another state ultimately was appointed until a South Dakota lawyer was nominated and approved.”

But then leaves out nearly half of the article which continues on….

Schreier declined to comment on whether she wants to keep Kornmann’s seat from slipping into Republican hands.
Piersol said, “I would just say we’re helping Judge Kornmann out. What he does is up to him.”

Yes, before you start, I am aware that newspapers will clip off parts of columns and articles that they purchase through syndication. But at least to this reader, it appears that they’ve strongly blunted the critique that the article had for the people sitting on South Dakota’s federal bench. In other words, it almost comes off as a different article.

You need to go read the rest of the article because the article as it was originally written appears to tell a much different story.

Kornmann, Piersol and Schreier have deep Democratic roots in a heavily Republican state.

Schreier is a former chairwoman of the South Dakota Democratic Party and Kornmann is a former state party executive director. Piersol served as majority leader of the South Dakota House as a Democrat in 1973-1974.

Piersol took heat from Republicans in 2004 for not recusing himself when then-Sen. Tom Daschle, a close friend and Democrat, took Republican poll watchers to court the night before the election in which Daschle lost to Thune.

Read that all here.

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